Cheltenham Festival Moves to Saturday A Gamble Not Worth Taking | Cheltenham Festival

For the fourth year running, Cheltenham saw an increase in attendance at the weekend’s season-opening showcase meeting, as 31,125 racegoers headed to the home of Jumps Racing. The total was a record since what was once a midweek meeting moved to a Friday/Saturday slot in 2007, while Saturday’s crowd of 21,113 was also a record for the second day of the meeting.

It’s a very positive start, in other words, to Guy Lavender’s first full time as chief executive at Cheltenham, and the man has been tasked with turning around the sudden – and largely inexplicable – fall in attendance at the festival meeting over the last three years.

Lavender, who joined the Jockey Club Racecourses after a seven-year stint as MCC chief executive, spent much of Friday and Saturday traveling the enclosures to get feedback from spectators on the customer experience changes he has implemented so far, such as removing most restrictions on where races can consume alcohol and (slightly) reducing the price of a pint.

And he also, perhaps, sounded the early reaction to an idea that initially floated in the race post last week, that the celebration meeting should move from the current slot of Tuesday-to-Friday to a schedule of Wednesday-to-Saturday instead.

There is little detail – in fact, no detail at all – about the details, such as whether the Gold Cup will be made on Friday or Saturday, but it is enough to set a non-running run and the pages of the post are filled with – mainly negative – responses from its readers for the rest of the week.

Each jumping fan has their own personal relationship with the festival, their own set of memories of spring days of triumph and disaster and, in the case of many regular festival racegoers, the cast of characters who shared unforgettable moments with them. You negotiate here at your peril, in other words, and many still haven’t fully embraced the transition from three days to four in 2005.

At the same time, however, there is no escaping the fact that the festival is not only the biggest money-spinner of the year for the jockey club racecourses—which, in turn, are the biggest commercial operators of the sport—but it has also managed to knock off almost a quarter of the 2022 record attendance of 280,627 in just three years.

It’s a situation that needs to be addressed, and Lavender is at too early a stage in his Cheltenham tenure – and too experienced – to rule anything. The fact that Saturday’s card alone drew almost the exact number of spectators that attended the final two-day showcase in 2006 can also be seen as a sign that the weekend works best for the modern racegoer.

However, the live audience is only part of the calculation, and a personal view is that those who are up in arms about more chaos in their festival traditions are probably worrying about nothing.

Why? Because many of the issues that, taken as a whole, eventually led to the track deciding against a five-day festival ending on Saturday are equally applicable to a Wednesday-to-Saturday meeting.

Gold Cup Friday is, and seems likely to remain, a seller, including in the chalets of corporate hospitality which account for a relatively small percentage of the overall attendance but a larger chunk of the track’s margin on tickets. There is little or no corporate profit in a celebration on Saturday, while ITV Racing coverage will almost certainly be avoided on ITV4 to accommodate the Six Nations rugby.

And competition from rugby is not limited to TV ratings. When the second day of the festival was abandoned due to high winds in 2008, any suggestion of extending to Saturday was quickly ruled out as many of the large army of temporary staff working on the meeting were already booked into Twickenham on the Saturday afternoon.

It’s the same story every time the idea of ​​a five-day festival is revived. When the numbers are crunched, and even before accounting for the extra competition from Premier League football over a significant period of time, it turns out that there are both practical and commercial reasons why it doesn’t make sense to stage two massive and historic sporting events within 100-or-so miles of each other on the same Saturday afternoon.

It seems only fair to see how Lavender’s more subtle but still significant tweaks, like relaxing the alcohol ban on front stands, play out. Having seen countless racegoers told “you can’t bring your drink here” during trips to and from the paddock down the years, I can’t help but think the new regime will be a huge positive for that all important word-of-mouth PR.

There is no single, simple solution to bring people back to the festival. There’s no introduction to the meeting like this, however, that a move to a Wednesday-to-Saturday festival felt even close to being a gamble worth taking.