the festival stays at four-days. hurrah!

​The decision by the Cheltenham Executive to keep the National Hunt Festival at 4-days has proved very popular. Although I am perfectly content with the decision, and fully appreciate the logic of rejecting a move to a fifth-day, I am still harbouring the instinct that a missed opportunity has occurred. 
Don’t get me wrong; I fully take on board the overwhelming sentiment that the quality of races has already diminished close to a point of no return. And yes, I did put forward a plan that could have incorporated all of the opposing factions; those who wanted the Festival to return to 3-days, those who were happy at four and Nicky Henderson who would have been quite happy to have a fifth-day. (A quick summary: I put forward the suggestion that all the championship races could have occupied the first three-days, with the fourth-day comprising all the handicaps, with the fifth comprising consolation races for the major handicaps, the Cross-Country race and the races dropped from the Festival over the years, including the United Hunts hunter chase and perhaps the often mooted mares bumper. The meeting to be renamed Cheltenham week incorporating the National Hunt Festival.)
Since Cheltenham announced the possibility of extending the Festival to a fifth-day, I advocated a ‘Heath Day’ on the Saturday, as was the case with Royal Ascot which when it was a four-day meeting concluded with an Ascot Heath meeting on the Saturday and which featured as the main race the Churchill Stakes.
I also advocated moving the Midland National to the Saturday before the Festival so that it combined with Sandown’s Imperial Cup to make a big betting day for the industry.
I hope the ‘Heath Day’ option remains on the back-burner as I believe this is a ‘missed opportunity’ for the wealth of the sport and the town of Cheltenham. Firstly, and I appreciate concerns about the ground deteriorating if Festival week coincides with wet weather, though that remains a possibility even at four-days, doesn’t it? And my ‘Heath’ suggestion actually offers Cheltenham a great amount of wriggle room if the weather gods do play havoc during the week. If, as happened the year of the big wind, one-day is lost due to the weather, instead of smuggling extra races into the following day or two, a fifth-day would allow Cheltenham to discard some of the planned Saturday races and run all the races temporarily postponed through the week. A safety-net, you might say.
I would have removed the Cross-Country race from the Festival proper, plumped-up the prize-money to compete with similar races on the continent, and had the race as the feature on the Saturday, building a programme around it in a similar vein to my suggestion for how a fifth Festival day might have worked.
The ’Heath Day’ would also allow the media, I.T.V. especially, the opportunity to reflect on the week, to interview jockeys, trainers and owners who triumphed on the biggest stage at length, with questions prepared and not asked ad hoc, with updates on the beaten horses and those that did not complete. And, as a Heath Day, it wouldn’t really matter so much if it was aired on I.T.V. 3 or 4. Also, if possible, a parade of the equine heroes might be arranged before they return to the stables, no doubt most of them across the water.
And, of course, being a Saturday there is greater marketing and publicity opportunities, with the meeting advertised as a ‘Family Fun Day-Out’, a chance to attract a newer audience to the racecourse, with perhaps local competitions with free tickets as prizes.
You know, I think a myth has been created that since the inception of the National Hunt Festival all the races were competitive in the extreme, especially the championship races. It simply isn’t true. Sure, there were golden periods, think of the Champion Hurdles of the late sixties through to the early nineties, when any one of a number of horses might win. Yet very often the great horses frightened away the opposition or, say in the case of Istabraq, one horse was so superior it was neither a good betting proposition nor did it make for a very interesting or exciting race. This season’s renewal may be one of the great years but its early doors and a Willie Mullins horse could easily look unbeatable and rival trainers could do a Paul Nicholls and keep their better horses for Aintree for easier pickings.
British horse racing needs all the revenue streams it can muster at this time of great upheaval, when the ‘Great Reset’ demands sky-high prices, the jackboot heel stamping on the self-employed, with ‘You will own nothing and be happy’, a W.E.F. motto that looms over us with the same menace as the Nazi army advancing through the territory of your neighbouring country. But I digress. We are living in uncertain times and the sport cannot be prissy and allow opportunities for growth to go untapped and untested.
The sport, and Cheltenham racecourse in particular, has a responsibility toward the town of Cheltenham. Over the past few years, the town lost the income from abandoned arts festival as well as the Cheltenham Festival and annually has to put up with anti-social behaviour and noisy good-humoured revelling. A fifth-day would bring greater revenue to the town’s pubs, hotels, clubs and restaurants. A fifth-day would be a way of saying thank-you.
We were all too fixated on the fifth-day being a Festival day. It need not be.