Mike Vince looks at the proposals for a five-day Cheltenham Festival and argues there are too many questions to answer for 2024 to be realistic.
For tens of thousands Cheltenham Festival week is the holy grail, Monday to travel, four days of spectacular action, and then a weekend to recover from the exertions.
Then spend a few hours in bed, which for many during the Festival is listed under ‘optional extra’, before starting the countdown to the following year on the Monday.
But would five days dilute the experience?
I haven’t been asked by Cheltenham for my two pennyworth but if I were I’d put a number of questions to them.
Firstly, what steps will you take to ensure that the acclaimed racing surface - and the key to a successful day, let alone four or five - can take that number of runners?
We don't know if a five-day Festival would be six or seven races a day, but the one stroke of good fortune Jon Pullin, Ben Hastie and the team had last month was that the torrential rain came on the Wednesday.
They got through the day with some last minute adjustments for the Weatherbys Champion Bumper and had a virgin track, the New Course, for the last two days. Parts of the Old Course would not have been raceable the following day. And we all know about the climate in March.
Just imagine what would have happened if it had been on day one of a five-day Festival and one of the tracks was hors de combat for the rest of the week. What on earth would the ground have been like by Saturday when you would race on it for the fourth successive day?
Then there’s the question of the extra races, with two needed even if the decision was six races a day for five days?
We’re back to the argument of a few years ago when the Mrs Paddy Power Chase was born. What do you bring in without diluting the quality?
One obvious race is the EBF Series Final, currently at fellow Jockey Club track Sandown the Saturday before, for which a qualifier is run at every jumps course in the land. You can certainly argue it gets a little lost in its current spot because of the Imperial Cup on the same card and the Festival countdown being in full swing.
But after that, what else is missing - or what else wouldn't cut into current races which in most cases in 2021 weren't flowing with runners?
Then you have the crowd question.
Four midweek days during March takes the under-18s, by and large, out of the equation. Instead it's a golden week for babysitters while the little darlings are at school by day, but that would completely change if a Saturday was brought in.
While having hoards of youngsters enjoying a day at the Festival and seeing our sport at its finest would be a great marketing exercise, do you really open the Guinness Village, insist that the younger generation carry ID and by trying to serve a different customer base on the Saturday, run the risk of alienating everyone else?
That then leads to the next question. At what stage, given the costs of staging the event, does it become an economic non-starter if you have, say, thousands of people who Cheltenham wouldn't normally charge for attending? Do they need a special Family Ticket, for example?
Next week sees Ireland’s big five-day Festival at Punchestown - and they have made a huge success of promoting their final day, the Saturday, as a Family Day. It has a designated area for children and families and a wonderful atmosphere. But it is very different in every way to the first four.
The debate about a fifth day will be passionate, but no matter what race meeting you are talking about, the horses, the track and the infrastructure (especially given the change in customer base for any weekend day) must be right. Then you think about capacity and other such issues.
Even if it gets the go-ahead at Cheltenham, does anyone think getting those right could be done in time for 2024 as some have suggested?
I certainly don't.
