4 days too much

From the 2061 Cheltenham official racecard:

123rd day

of this year’s

Festival Meeting

, the biggest and best yet. Today’s highlight is an exciting one – the

64Black.com Gold Cup

(formerly known as the

Martin Pipe Conditional Jockey’s Hurdle Trial Stakes

), the most prestigious "pipe-opener" for the

Martin Pipe

itself, which will of course be run as the centrepiece of our

Day 197 Festival Card

, on

August 31st

. The card also features the

Queen Katherine (Mares Only) Selling 3M Hurdle

, one of our most popular and patriotic new additions to the 2051 calendar, which this year will attract runners from Estonia, Greenland and Outer Mongolia. Myself and our dedicated service team of sexy marketing robots are of course at your service throughout the card. Best wishes,

Bigbucks Gillespie (CEO, Bart.)

Enjoy the Craic!

i belive that cheltenham wasent that keen on going to 4 days but JCR pushed it through but to be honest i love it at four days now and cant belive people still want it all to finish on the thursday.
a saturday finish is a certanty and that will be fine as long as the gold cup is on the last day but given the amount of money that JCR will finaly be spending on cheltenhams redovelopment(after wasting cheltenhams profits on kemptons sandpit)i fear that they will push for a 5th day to recoup the cash.
why do have so many have a downer on the ryanair chase?
its been a great adition to the festival and has come of age but the irish chap in the weekender last week described the ryanair as "a mutton dressed as lamb race"…well how would he described this years irish hennessy then?
last week someone from timeform on cheltenham radio called the ryanair "a grade one in name only"..this falls in line with the general timeform view on this it seems, but i would argue that the ryanir is a far stronger grade one than such as the BETFAIR ascot chase(too close to festival)and the BETFAIR lancashire chase(changes to course making it just a trial for king george nowadays).

If I were going to reduce it to three days, well, I’d need to get rid of six races, I reckon.

They would be:

Neptune Novices Hurdle (There’s no 2m4/5f open hurdle, thus making this pointless).

The Martin Pipe (Why?)

The Jewson Handicap (in the presence of the spangly Jewson Golden Miller, this is redundant)

Coral Cup (see Neptune Novices Hurdle)

Champion Bumper (isn’t this really what the Ascot Gold Cup should be for? )

The Charity Flat Race (yes, I am a heartless *******).

Oh, and if there were REALLY strong calls for one of those races to be reprieved, I’d kick out the Mares Hurdle.

Anyway, let’s have this hypothetical three day festival running from Thursday to Saturday, and we can all go home happy. Or summat.

FLD

@ Pinza.

I can see a five day festival by 2015: Perhaps achieved by three or four divided races (e.g. the Triumph) and the addition of a Mares bumper. I hope it doesn’t happen, but everything I’ve feared under the Chinless Marketeers who run the sport has come true, so five days here we come.

The change was the decision that Cheltenham needed to have a championship race over every distance in every division. When it was a three day meeting, there was no two and a half mile chase of Grade 1 status and it was a regular complaint by some.

However, that division was catered for at Aintree and elsewhere but Cheltenham wanted to completely corner the market so every NH championship division had to be represented (bar the Grand National contenders of course).

The meeting expanded to four days to fill the gaps – add the Bumper and the cross-country race and you’re pretty much at four days.

I recognise and understand it – I simply don’t agree with it. We don’t run ALL the Flat classics at Newmarket and there’s no harm in providing other venues for championship events.

I love the four day format although wouldn’t be keen on extending it further.

Every day gets huge crowds and big betting turnover on every race – surely what we should be striving for.

You don’t need to go everyday but the coverage in the media is magnificent.

Everybody in jump racing strives to compete at the Festival and this encourage ownership. In particular the Mares race encourages more mares to be kept in training, which is a good thing, and you have to have a cross country chase now that Cheltenham has invested in the lay out.

The extra day pays towards so much that benefits racing.

I can’t believe anybody would begrudge the charity race as an additional event. Great cause and helps crowd dispersal.

Why the negativity about 4 days? Is it because it is too expensive to go for the whole week or do people think that you can have too much of a good thing?

Peruvian Chief,

Money talks and a 4 day festival with diluted races will continue.

I’m not going to knock the festival as 4 days is an absolute feast but my only pet hate is there are a few too many handicaps these days.

However your final point about the difficulty in identifying the NH Champion novices is a fair one. If Bobs Worth had ran in and won the 2m5f race you could proclaim him the best staying novice, however there is an element of doubt as he won the 3m novice race.

Contrast that with the flat boys where RFC are heavily marketing and pouring money into the Champions series to encourage the best horses to complete against each other at the end of the season.

http://www.independent.ie

Expansion diluting quality of festival
Before the dust had settled on the 2011 Cheltenham Festival, the managing director Edward Gillespie yesterday spoke of how it was "odds-on" that another race would be added to the meeting next year to bring the figure for the week to 28.

There are even plans for a £30m Prestbury Park makeover, which would be funded by, wait for it, a fifth day. Honest!

The Cheltenham Festival is the showcase for jump racing’s elite talent.

History and tradition decree that it is the premier National Hunt meeting, defined by its championship events and complemented by a worthy supporting card.

The executive seems to have forgotten that.

With the addition of a fourth day in 2005, the Festival ideal is slowly being eroded.

Naturally, those involved will feel that more races at Cheltenham means more chances of a winner there, but the quality of the event is gradually being diluted to an inexcusable degree.

Prior to 2005, the name of every handicap at the Festival, and their winners, rolled off the tongue.

Along with the two amateur races, you had the County, Pertemps and Coral Cup Hurdles, the Mildmay of Flete, Cathcart and William Hill Chases — all hard won and prestigious contests.

Without meaning to put a dampener on last week’s incredible blitz, which was a much-needed shot in the arm for the industry in this country, the fact of the matter is, just four days later, you’d struggle to name all the handicaps that were run last Thursday, never mind the whole week.

Rejoicing in each of the Irish triumphs will live long in the memory, but many of the horses which won those middling handicaps will never be heard of again.

The extent of Cheltenham’s skewed thinking can be found in the kind of race that is on the shortlist to be added to proceedings.

One is a Grand National Trial — ergo another handicap for slow horses — while Robert Waley-Cohen, owner of Long Run and the new chairman at Cheltenham, yesterday expressed his desire for a new novice hurdle for fillies, one that would start as a Grade Two, "and then hopefully attract the class of filly to become a Grade One."

Maybe he was caught up in all the build-up to the Gold Cup, but Mr Waley-Cohen might have missed that on Tuesday Quevega sauntered home for a third time in yet another poorly contested Grade Two mares’ race.

Now, Quevega is a wonderful mare, but where exactly are all these classy fillies going to come from for a mares’ novice race? The mind boggles.

As some great races reminded us last week, Cheltenham has something special, intangible almost, that needs to be protected, not compromised.

By all means tinker in the name of progress — and there is plenty that needs tinkering with — but a policy based fundamentally on more is not the answer.

That ideal is already catered for at Galway every summer.