By the end of last year’s meeting, it was clear that the Cheltenham Festival was cannibalising itself.
Crowds were down, competitiveness was down, prices were up, complaints were up, the buzz was down, exclusivity was up. It seemed like the allure of the meeting had passed saturation point.
On the ground, the pinch points were a catalogue of the usual stuff. A pint of porter in the Guinness village was £7.50; cheese and bacon burgers were £12.50; a bacon roll was £8. Entry to the car park was £20, but so much rain fell early in the week that cars were being towed out by tractors and the ground became so drenched that the car park was closed on Gold Cup day, the signature day in the entire jumps season.
The Wifi signal was a throwback to pirate radio stations on your transistor. If you feel like you’re being screwed the niggly things add up.
Denis Walsh: Suffocating stranglehold of rich owners has changed Cheltenham’s nature
Cheltenham: Lossiemouth switched from Champion Hurdle to defend her Mares' Hurdle crown instead
JP McManus: From fearless young punter to Cheltenham’s most successful racehorse owner
Malachy Clerkin: Cheltenham’s thrill is gone as the best stories are replaced by the betting, the betting, the betting
In the modern world, every major sports event must listen to anecdotal bellyaching from punters. The importance of the “customer experience” has migrated into sport from other territories in the entertainment world.
The problem for Cheltenham is that the growing dissatisfaction has started to hit their bottom line. When crowds returned after the pandemic a record attendance of over 280,000 turned up in 2022. From that height, though, numbers have fallen off a cliff. In 2024 the aggregate crowd was less than 230,000, a precipitous drop of more than 50,000 in just two years.
For Cheltenham’s owners, the Jockey Club, income from the festival is critical to their overall business. They own 14 other tracks, including prestigious venues such as Sandown, Newmarket and Epsom, but the Cheltenham festival darns all the holes in their socks.
After last year’s meeting, Cheltenham denied any suggestion of “complacency” on their part. Instead, they pointed to the “cost of living” crisis and the high cost of accommodation during festival week.
The London Independent established that the average cost of a hotel room in Cheltenham for four nights that week was £3,000. The cheapest room for late booking on the eve of the festival was £399.
Irishracing.com drilled into the figures and discovered that the increasingly popular practice of decamping to Spain to watch the festival in Benidorm and other resorts would cost just a quarter of the price of going to Cheltenham for the same four days.
Cheltenham rejected suggestions that lowering the price of admission tickets would make any appreciable difference. Their own costs had increased by about 50% since 2019, they insisted. Somebody would have to pay, was the inference.
Tickets range in price from £37 for the Best Mate enclosure – on the far side of the course, with no access to the parade ring or the grandstands – to £112 for a Club Enclosure badge.
As the Racing Post pointed out, you can attend four days of Punchestown’s end of season festival for less than £100 or both days of Longchamp’s Arc meeting for £66.
The issues, though, are deeper than the costs. The Six Nations is a rip-off too, but the stadia are still full.
The problem is that the fundamental nature of the festival has changed. Through the decades the winners were always likely to be owned by rich people and stabled in the most successful yards, but that dominance has turned into a suffocating stranglehold.
The romance has been smothered. The underdog stories have all but vanished. The talent scouting of the big trainers and the biggest owners is so comprehensive now that good young horses in small yards are not missed. Cheltenham dreams have always been for sale, but the economy of racing has changed so much that small yards are much less likely to keep a promising young horse.
The resources of the tycoons at the top of the national hunt game are so vast now that they can afford to buy in bulk and absorb the losses: a certain percentage of horses will get injured and never make it to the track; another percentage won’t end up being as good as they looked after their first run in a point-to-point or a bumper. The most expensive commodity in bloodstock is potential. The biggest owners can afford to budget for blow-outs.
Of the 27 races at last year’s festival, 25 were won by rich people. Two were won by syndicates.
For owners such as JP McManus and Rich Ricci and Michael O’Leary’s Gigginstown Stud and Bective Stud and Robcour and Joe Donnelly, they have volume on their side.
Gigginstown, for example, have had 32 winners at the festival, but that is from 334 runs. In their best year at Cheltenham, they had seven winners; in McManus’ best year he had seven too. Even 10 years ago those numbers would have been unimaginable.
The game has always needed rich people, but the market has become so overheated that small players and even middle-sized players have become marginalized at the biggest festivals. The dispersal sale of Andy and Gemma Brown’s stock 13 months ago was a vivid snapshot of the crackpot market.
Caldwell Potter was sold for a staggering €740,000 to a rich man’s syndicate that includes Alex Ferguson – a record sale for a jumps horse. At the same sale, Robcour paid €620,000 for Fil Dor, Gigginstown Stud parted with €510,000 for Staffordshire Knot and Sa Fureur went to Bective Stud for €330,000.
As it turns out, those horses are not nearly as good as seemed likely when they walked around the sales ring. All of them have entries in handicaps this week, rather than the Grade One races for which they were bought.
Those owners, though, have a battalion of other horses to play with. Cheltenham is their playground. The dichotomy between the ordinary racegoer and the rich people who have colonised the winner’s enclosure has never been greater.
And the rest of us? We make of it what we choose. Cheltenham is still about the best horses and the best jockeys and the greatest pressure, and the resolution of months of build-up. It is still about escapism and doing crazy things, as if it were Rag Week. It is still about champions and the most spellbinding venue in jumps racing. Walking in the gates is still thrill.
Am I going? Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Mad.
