The possibility of seeing a new star of the jumping game drew more than 10,000 fans here on Friday for the first day of the 2016-17 season at the home of the National Hunt Festival but this year there were glimpses of the future on both sides of the running rail.
ITV Racing, which will take over terrestrial coverage of the sport from Channel 4 when it broadcasts the New Year’s Day card here, used the first afternoon of the Showcase meeting to stage a full dress rehearsal of the coverage that will become familiar to racing fans over the next four years.
From a full recording on Friday morning of The Opening Show, its version of Channel 4’s Morning Line, to a sun-drenched afternoon on the track, ITV Racing set out as it means to carry on.
They will need to hit the ground running, unlike the four-runner field for the first race of Cheltenham’s new season which walked for the best part of a furlong before finally breaking into something close to a gallop. And for all that this was a ghost broadcast – Channel 4 will be here for real on Saturday – there was a definite sense of purpose about the various members of the ITV Racing team as they went about their business.
Ed Chamberlin, recruited from Monday Night Football on Sky Sports to anchor ITV Racing’s coverage throughout the year, was, as his job title suggests, very firmly anchored in the parade ring throughout the afternoon. He was fenced in as well, behind a knee-high hedge, and joined in his mini-enclosure by two former jump jockeys, Luke Harvey and Mick Fitzgerald, and the former Flat jockey Hayley Turner whenever a race from the Flat card at Doncaster was imminent.
Elsewhere around the track Matt Chapman reported from the betting ring with his trademark enthusiasm, Oli Bell conducted instant interviews with the winning riders as they pulled up and Alice Plunkett, one of the members of the Channel 4 team who has successfully cleared the jump to ITV, handled on-the-spot interviews in the winner’s enclosure.
Betting, meanwhile, was a running thread in the coverage, which will not please everyone but was all but inevitable given the £30m outlay on rights that ITV needs to recover, not least by selling advertising to bookmakers. There was even a brief sighting of decimal odds in ITV’s graphics, which flashed up the starting price of El Bandit, who recorded a hard-fought success in the first, as 6-5, and then switched the fraction into its decimal equivalent of 2.2.
The most striking aspect of ITV’s camerawork, however, was undoubtedly the use of a drone camera, positioned high above the ditch at the top of the hill, to provide an overhead view of the runners as they started their descent towards the home turn. The shots gave a real sense of a drama moving towards its final scene, in one of the most famous natural amphitheatres in sport.
The first two races of Cheltenham’s new season unfolded in familiar fashion as Paul Nicholls completed a double with El Bandit and Marracudja, the latter successful in a two-mile novice chase. Nicholls already has the Grade One Henry VIII Novice Chase at Sandown in early December in mind for Marracudja but also feels that the five-year-old may be more suited by Aintree and Punchestown in the spring.
“That may be the only time this season that he runs here,” Nicholls said. “He will go to Sandown and then to the Wayward Lad [Novice Chase] at Kempton over Christmas. Aintree [in April] is made for him when he is fresh.”
Tiger Roll, the winner of the 2014 Triumph Hurdle, was in the field for the card’s three-mile novice chase but he seems unlikely to scale Festival-winning heights over fences as he struggled home in third place behind a 1-2 for Henry de Bromhead as Heron Heights beat Full Cry. Heron Heights took a strong hold for the first mile of the race but still had enough left to power past his stable companion up the hill.
“He can be keen but Philip [Enright] is a really underrated rider and a super horseman and he got him settled and did a good job on him,” de Bromhead said.
“It’s nice to get back on the winner’s board here because it’s been a few years [since Sizing Symphony won at this meeting in 2011]. We had a feast of winners here for a couple of years but since then it’s been a bit barren. Maybe the four-miler [the National Hunt Chase, which will be run this year in honour of the late jockey JT McNamara] could be the race for him [at the Festival].”
