Cheltenham jumps into action after fixing its troublesome hole

There is little chance to catch your breath as the racing seasons turn and six days on from Ascot’s exhilarating Champions Day Cheltenham will open its gates on Friday for the first card of the 2026-27 campaign. Racing will return to the spiritual home of National Hunt after an abrupt curtailment to Cheltenham’s latest season.

That was to allow for extensive work on the track’s drainage system after the discovery of a significant hole in the racing surface on Trials day in late January. The festival meeting in March went ahead as planned, but the Jockey Club, which owns the course, announced soon afterwards that the popular mid-April meeting and the hunter-chase card in May had been sacrificed to allow sufficient time for remedial work to take place.

More than a kilometre of drainage has been replaced or upgraded and the Old and New courses received a thorough examination with ground-penetrating radar, which showed no additional causes for concern. “We’re really pleased with how the track has responded to the significant drainage works,” Jon Pullin, Cheltenham’s clerk of the course, said on Monday.

“Our decision to cancel the last three racedays of last season in order to maximise the time to carry out the work and for the ground to recover was certainly the right one. “Everyone knows how long, hot and dry our summer was and the team here have been working tirelessly, just like grounds teams all over the UK, to irrigate and prepare the track ahead of our season opener.” The Showcase meeting was once little more than a loosener after the summer break to ease Cheltenham back into the swing.

As a two-day midweek meeting at the turn of the century, it attracted 16,000 racegoers. Like most of the non-festival days at Cheltenham its popularity has increased steadily over the past 20 years, to the point where the 21,113 for the Saturday card last year was more than three times the attendance for the Flat card at Doncaster the same afternoon featuring the Futurity Trophy, the final Group One of the year.

Cheltenham races so sparingly over the winter that there is no longer any such thing as a minor day at the track, in the main part of the season at least. The loss of three cards in April and May was a small price to pay to ensure that the ground was right for the return of racing in October.

As one problem with the going is apparently solved, another, less tractable issue remains, for Cheltenham and for National Hunt racing more generally. Cheltenham has already been forced to abandon the cross-country race at the November meeting because of firm ground and that is just the latest in a series of cancellations over jumps in recent weeks.

Kempton, Exeter, Ludlow, Fakenham, Warwick and Wincanton have been forced to abandon meetings due to unsuitably fast ground, while Chepstow’s Welsh Racing Festival from 9 to 11 October ended up as an all-hurdles meeting. Cheltenham has a watering system, but even that has its limitations.

The going for this week’s meeting is now officially good, having been good, good-to-firm in places on Sunday, but the taps are now off due to an unsettled forecast. “We had 8mm of rain overnight last night [Sunday into Monday] and expect some further rain tonight into tomorrow,” Pullin said.

“As a result, and in light of the uncertain forecast for the end of this week, we’ve stopped watering. We’re good ground all over currently, but we’ll have to wait and see how much rainfall we get on Thursday and Friday before I can say with any real confidence what we’ll be when the tapes go up.” Cheltenham’s struggle to maintain attendance at the festival meeting has been well-documented in recent years, though last season’s meeting had a modest, but very welcome increase after three years of steady decline.

But that has been at least partially balanced by the increasing popularity of the non-festival meetings, including a remarkable turnout of 44,900 on New Year’s Day that was 232 below the total for the second day of the festival. The festival experience has clearly been a tricky sell since the post-Covid high of 2022, but the core Cheltenham experience – the atmosphere, the setting and, above all, the excitement and competitiveness of the racing – has remained in high demand.

To maintain that all-important competitiveness the track needs big fields with fit, in-form horses and improving youngsters and novices moving up the pyramid. If this year’s long, dry summer is becoming the rule and not the exception, the base of the pyramid could steadily erode.

The next scheduled fixtures at Exeter and Wincanton are the biggest events of the year at both tracks and form a mini-festival – the West Country Weekend – on 6 and 7 November featuring the Haldon Gold Cup and the Badger Beers Chase. Since both tracks have already lost cards this season – Exeter, has cancelled two – there must be serious doubt about both days if the dry weather continues.

The long, dry summer was a boon for Champions Day at Ascot, which has often been staged on deep winter ground. For the country’s smaller jumps tracks, however, the climate crisis could increasingly been seen as an existential threat.