AN Renton has been Jockey Club Racecourses Regional Director for the South West since 2012, and while that puts tracks like Wincanton and Warwick under his remit, it’s his role managing Cheltenham Racecourse which puts him in the public eye.

Ian may only have been in the role for a little over five years but his association with Cheltenham goes back decades. His grandfather, Bobby Renton was one of the foremost trainers of the post-war era, winning the Grand National in 1950 with Freebooter, and a hatful of races at the Cheltenham Festival with horses such as Cushendun and Prudent Barney. Bobby Renton’s final runner at the meeting was a horse called Red Rum, who finished fourth in the Mildmay of Flete ‘Chase in 1971, before finding greater fame at Aintree for Ginger McCain after his former handler had retired.

I asked Ian about ‘Rummy’, the one-man-band that was his predecessor and former mentor Edward Gillespie and his vision for the future in the Cotswolds.

What was it like to know Red Rum before he was famous?

My grandfather trained near Ripon, and for me it was brilliant, as my days of visiting the stables up there were when Red Rum was in training, and it encouraged my interest in the sport.

You were interested in racing from an early age, but what are your earliest memories of the Cheltenham Festival?

I first attended the Festival as a 14-year-old schoolboy. I got the train down on Champion Hurdle day and saw Comedy Of Errors win. The first Gold Cup I saw was two years later when Ten Up sluiced through the mud to win and racing was abandoned after the big race. I remember walking up the members’ lawn as they jumped the last almost keeping pace with them, they were finishing so slowly. It was an amazing experience even then.

How did you first come to work at the home of jump racing?

I answered an ad looking for a trainee manager at Cheltenham and started on January 1st 1985, and spent just over three years here, leaving after the 1988 Festival to look after Wincanton and Salisbury Racecourses.

You worked directly for Edward Gillespie in that time – what kind of experience was that?

It was a totally different era – we have a staff here in the office now of 60 people, including the ground staff, and another 20 next door. When I started in 1985, I think there were seven of us, Edward, myself and Philip Arkwright who was clerk back then, and a few covering memberships, finance and administration. It was a small office covering the early days of the Festival as we now know it. It was, back then, a small three-day event which grew so much under Edward, becoming the massive Festival it is now.

How tough a job is it succeeding someone who revolutionised the fixture and what challenges have you faced in taking over from Gillespie?

My biggest challenge here was simply being the one to follow Edward – it had been 32 years and they are very big boots to fill! I was lucky enough to come back at a time when the development had been timetabled, and on the back of that, we’ve concentrated on the infrastructure and the service we provide to customers.

Edward was brilliant at being almost a one-man-band, with Simon Claisse to look after the racing side, but it’s fair to say that the old facilities weren’t adequate for the increasing number of people attending in March. We’ve built up teams to handle marketing, operations and sales more professionally, and to ensure that we can give better facilities and better service to our racegoers.

It was important in overseeing the redevelopment that the new stand and the structures which surrounded it were met with approval from racegoers and not seen as something alien to the atmosphere of Cheltenham. I inherited a budget of £32m for the new development but felt that we needed to do more than just erect a new stand, so I negotiated an increase in that budget to £45m, which enabled us to make the parade ring the central focus, and what we’ve achieved is to have enhanced views of the racecourse from the front of the new stand and the same to the parade ring from the rear. Racegoers now have improved access to the parade ring and the pre-parade ring and the horse is very much the focus of the work we’ve done here, which is as our customers want it.

The new development is a great accomplishment for the track, but it’s by no means a fait accompli, and there is no sense of resting on our laurels. One area I’ve been extremely keen to improve is that of the temporary facilities; corporate hospitality has very much moved forward in terms of the quality and luxury provided to customers and an event of the magnitude and importance of the Cheltenham Festival shouldn’t lag behind.

As a result we’ve improved our offering in that area to a level we can now be proud of. There will always be improvements which need to be made, whether to improve the experience of racegoers, or to better the facilities for owners and trainers, and indeed stable staff, and we will always be keen to re-evaluate our offering to ensure we gain a reputation of one of the best sporting venues, not just in the United Kingdom, but in the world.

What is your vision for the future of Cheltenham Racecourse in the medium to longterm?

Aside from what I’ve said about constant improvement of facilities and services, it should be remembered that the Festival is primarily about competitive racing and that’s something we don’t want to lose sight of. We want to ensure that those four days in March maintain their position as the best a racing Festival can offer and to ensure that we always get the best competitors here from the UK and Ireland.

On top of that, we would like to encourage a more international aspect to the racing and we’ve been actively recruiting runners from France for some time. We would also love to get a runner from the United States, and a couple of years ago we introduced the Iroquois Cheltenham Challenge, which offers a $500k bonus to the winner of the Sunbets Stayers’ Hurdle and the Calvin Houghland Iroquois Hurdle, run at Percy Warner Park in Nashville in May.

We’re always looking at what activities can take place at Cheltenham, and continue to investigate possibilities including the building of a hotel, which would have obvious synergies with the racecourse, and the other avenue we are exploring is the possibility of having concerts here in the summer.

It’s said that preparations for the Cheltenham Festival begin the day after the previous one finishes. How true is that and how big is the scale of preparation in the final weeks leading up to the event?

Immediately after the racing is finished we meet to discuss what has gone well and what could have gone better, and plan accordingly, so it’s true that it’s a year-round job. The physical preparation steps up at the start of the season, in October, when we start building some of the temporary facilities, which remain in place until April. That work ramps up in January with a huge three-storey viewing facility, which is 185-metres long, being put together and that work is progressing well. That is probably our single biggest task, especially when considering that our temporary facilities cover the same acreage as the permanent structures. Those will all require to be fitted out to the highest standards, and the existing facilities maintained, while there’s also the job of preparing both the old and new courses for the racing to come.

When we finally open the gates, the work isn’t done by any means, and we will have 8,000 people employed every day in a variety of capacities to ensure that the event runs as smoothly as possible.

The Festival is clearly a massive undertaking, but it also reaps huge benefits, not just for Jockey Club Racecourses, but for the town of Cheltenham as well. How important is that, and how important is the annual Irish pilgrimage to Cheltenham in March?

I can tell you that it brings in excess of £100m in revenue to the local economy, which is something we determined when doing a study two or three years ago. Over the four days, there will be 260,000 people in attendance, and over 40,000 hospitality covers, which are two of the key revenues to the racecourse, but many of those people will also be staying in and around Cheltenham as well as eating, drinking and shopping there, and the benefit of that increase in spending trickles down.

The Irish love affair with Cheltenham is not unrequited, and the enthusiasm of Irish trainers, owners and racegoers for the festival is as big a marketing initiative as you could pay for, so we are tremendously grateful. We conducted some market research in Ireland last year, and determined that 30% of Festival attendees came over from Ireland, and we are also seeing a marked increase in hospitality covers coming from Irish companies, and it’s also great to have Ballymore back as sponsors. The Irish renaissance isn’t confined to the Prestbury Cup, I’m pleased to say!

For the future, you recently rebutted the notion of having a veterans’ chase as part of the Festival, and with the mooting of new races comes the recurring question of whether Cheltenham will stretch to five days racing in March. What are your plans, if any, for amending the current programme?

We always look after each Festival to question whether we have the right mix of races, and whether each day works as well as it should, and to amend the running order if necessary. In short, I believe that we have the right number of days and the right number of races on each of those days.

Last year we increased the time between races to 40 minutes, which means we can fit a maximum of seven races in with a 1.30pm start, and all the feedback from that move has been positive – we feel it gives racegoers more time to get to and from the paddock, and eases congestion for those queuing for bars, food or toilets.

In terms of new races, there has been talk of a novice chase for mares being added to the programme, and that would appear the most logical addition, but it’s important to make sure that there is the demand and the population to support it. If we were to bring in a mares’ chase, we would have to be satisfied that the quality of mares in training would justify it, and importantly, we would have to lose a current race to find space – there is no question of squeezing a 29th race in, so any discussion of extra races needs to be understood in that context. J