the start and the finish are as important as what happens in between.

​The finish of the 2023/24 season was a suitably celebratory event. The trophies to the champions were awarded before as fine a meeting as we have enjoyed all season brought the curtain down on National Hunt -for a short-time – to allow the flat season the full glow of appreciation.
It would be good for the sport if there was to be an actual official start to the new jumps season, something akin to the Sandown finale we enjoyed yesterday. Chepstow and the 4-year-old Free Handicap used to signify the change from the languid and slow-moving summer jumping programme to the start of the season ‘proper’, though latterly Cheltenham’s Paddy Power Gold Cup meeting has come to be acknowledged as the starting pistol to the National Hunt season. Cheltenham is the most suitable racecourse for the start of the season and I would suggest the meeting could be re-vamped to encourage trainers to have their star horses out a little earlier than is normal. 
Cheltenham has an excellent irrigation system and good drainage and usually provides good jumping ground for its opening meeting, so why not mimic Sandown and stage a 2-mile conditions chase, a similar race for Gold Cup and Ryanair horses, as well as a conditions hurdle, either over 2-miles or half-a-mile longer? I would also suggest transferring, even though it no longer has the same profile as in days gone by, the 4-year-old Free handicap Hurdle from Chepstow. Start with a Catherine Wheel, not a sparkler.
And this brings me to the flat. Can you believe the flat began 5-weeks ago. Karl Burke recently suggested in the Racing Post that the turf flat season should not begin until after the Grand National and he makes a perfectly rational point. The flat begins with a whimper and ends in the same manner. Given the prominence of the Grand National, the Scottish and Irish Nationals and the meeting most people continue to refer to as the Whitbread meeting, outside observers can be forgiven if they think the flat is poised to take over the spotlight, when in fact it has limped along, meeting after meeting being abandoned due to the long monsoon season Britain has experienced this winter/spring, for over 5-weeks already.
I have moaned long and hard about the diminished nature of the Lincoln Handicap and have put forward my idea of how to make the race stand-out to the public again as was once the case back in the heyday of the ‘Spring Double’. Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, no one has taken my idea of a 40-runner Lincoln started from a barrier seriously, so I will not put it forward again here. But the Lincoln should be restored as a race any jockey would be honoured to have on his or her c.v.
If the premierising – can we simply call it ‘premier racing’ – of meetings is to be a success, which I doubt it will be, it is the races of distinction that need to be singled out for special treatment, not the undercard, where most of the races are, in comparison to the main event, ordinary affairs in the minds of the public. The Lincoln Handicap is, in racing terms, an historic race. If it were a building it would have listed status. If it were a habitat, it would be a site of prime scientific importance. And yet British racing has allowed it to become just another handicap, as good a place to start the turf flat season as any other handicap. 
I would suggest, as with the opening Cheltenham fixture, that the Lincoln meeting be revamped, with a Guineas trial, perhaps both 2,000 and 1,000, with other valuable handicaps and perhaps condition races to encourage trainers to have top sprinters and stayers out earlier than has become the norm. Give the flat a bang-opening, a fanfare to herald the beginning of another flat season and not the ‘oh my god, here we go again’ feel that is presently the start to the glorious flat.