ANOTHER year, another set of Cheltenham Festival changes. It’s becoming as predictable as Willie Mullins being crowned leading trainer that every season rotations are talked about at the National Hunt meeting we all look forward to most.

At this point, you might start to wonder when the tinkering will end.

This isn’t to turn a nose up at proactive management for jump racing’s flagship festival. Attendances have been under scrutiny at the Festival in recent years as punters vote with their feet, and those at the helm haven’t been shy about making adjustments. Still, you’d have to wonder whether they are really getting at the heart of the issue.

As well as announcing reduced field size limits and starting position tweaks for certain races, the headline change revealed by The Jockey Club last week was the switch in schedule for the Grade 1 Close Brothers Mares’ Hurdle from primetime Tuesday to race three on Thursday.

Instead, the opening day’s card now gets the pesky TrustATrader Plate Handicap Chase added to its programme. From Tuesday’s perspective, it’s like subbing on a borderline intermediate-level player into your senior GAA team’s forward line in a bid to win the match. It does nothing to strengthen the quality of day one.

Now, Cheltenham officials might prefer to subtract from Tuesday in a bid to boost Thursday interest levels; a card that has often felt like the weakest of the four. As pointed out in last week’s announcement by Jon Pullin, head of racing at The Jockey Club and clerk of the course at Cheltenham, each of the four days at the Festival now have at least three Grade 1s.

However, the wider comments around the move suggested there is another motivation at the heart of the decision.

“Having previously been run on Champion Day, the Close Brothers Mares’ Hurdle was always somewhat in the shadow of the Unibet Champion Hurdle,” said Pullin.

“This has been particularly evident in recent years since it was elevated to Grade 1 status and taking place as the race immediately before the Unibet Champion Hurdle on the card… By moving to St Patrick’s Thursday, we feel the Close Brothers Mares’ Hurdle will receive more attention and receive the coverage a race of its status merits.”

Telling impact?

If the Mares’ Hurdle has felt in the shadow of the Champion on Tuesday, a huge part of that is surely down to the make-up of the two fields, rather than being anything to do with its place in the running order. Several times recently we’ve seen Champion Hurdle-calibre mares being re-routed to the mares-only option for the sake of tackling a more winnable race. That has never felt like the right mantra for the Cheltenham Festival, but it is a reality.

After Lossiemouth’s long-range plan to run in the Champion Hurdle was shelved and she went off odds-on for the second year in a row for the Mares’ Hurdle last March, there was surely never a better opportunity for the authorities to act on the back of a race that turned into one-way traffic. They have spurned that chance.

Some had suggested a change to the race conditions whereby previous Grade 1 winners in open company could not contest the Mares’ Hurdle, and instead they would be forced to take on the boys in the Champion or Stayers’ Hurdle. Now that would make a materialistic change to taking the Mares’ Hurdle out of the shadows of the Champion, if that was actually a major concern. Moving it from Tuesday to Thursday won’t enhance the race’s stature.

If there is one group to really benefit from the schedule switch, there’s every chance it’s the bookmakers. We all know that punters like to get on the front foot on day one at Cheltenham, many trying to combine a few strong Grade 1 fancies in multiples.

Taking out the Mares’ Hurdle removes what has been one of the more punter-positive contests from the opening day. Will punters who were trying to stack multiples involving races like the Supreme, Arkle and Champion Hurdle really have a strong opinion in the Plate, like they might have done in the Mares’? I highly doubt it.

With the exception of a couple of high-profile falls for Annie Power and Benie Des Dieux at the last, the two-and-a-half-mile hurdle has been one of the more punter-friendly races at the meeting. Across 17 renewals, there have been 10 winning favourites and 14 winners sent off at 6/1 or shorter.

Bookmaker-friendly

In fairness, the Plate has become a little easier to solve for punters in recent years, with Jagwar well backed into 3/1 favouritism on his way to winning last season and other winners like The Shunter, Simply The Betts, Siruh Du Lac and The Storyteller all 5/1 or shorter.

Still, that has absolutely not been the case in general. Since the turn of the millennium, the majority of Plates have undoubtedly gone the way of the bookmakers, thanks to winning SPs of 12/1, 12/1, 12/1, 14/1, 14/1, 14/1, 16/1, 16/1, 18/1, 20/1, 22/1, 25/1, 25/1, 25/1, 33/1, 33/1, 50/1 and 66/1.

It mightn’t have been everyone’s cup of tea, but the era of Douvan-Un De Sceaux-Faugheen-Annie Power style accumulators on day one are likely out the window now.

Tuesday has long been a favourite day for the vast majority of Cheltenham fans, and it is slowly losing some of that stardust. With the Plate added to the programme, it now means that the majority of day one’s races are handicaps - four in total.

This column lamented the loss of the National Hunt Chase’s amateur status last season, also becoming a handicap. It was a blow to the meeting’s tradition.

The Tuesday schedule probably wasn’t done any favours in 2021 either when the Fred Winter was swapped back onto day one, as the Novices’ Handicap Chase was removed (essentially reinstated again, however, to Thursday in yet another change last season!).

Only one of the last 15 Fred Winter favourites have won, while there have been winning SPs of 18/1, 25/1, 25/1, 33/1, 33/1, 33/1, 40/1 and 80/1. It is typically another bookmaker-friendly race.

More switches

Don’t forget, it was only in 2013 that the Cross Country was run on the Tuesday as well (now fixed for Wednesday).

What’s more, familiarity can be important for casual followers of the sport knowing what to expect each year, and such frequent changes aren’t a help in that regard. Neither are regular changes to the names of the races at the meeting.

It’s pretty much commonplace every year for trainers to misname the races they’re targeting their horses at for Cheltenham in media engagements leading up to the meeting. If they are struggling to remember the right, up-to-date names of Cheltenham’s contests, what chance do the passing followers of the sport have?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that there are two much bigger issues at the heart of Cheltenham’s challenges. Firstly, the whole week has become extremely expensive for racing fans to attend between ticketing, accommodation, travel, food and drink.

That has a definite impact on the travelling Irish contingent, who once attended all four days but many can’t justify the expenditure of staying the entire week now.

Secondly, there are not the number of top-quality horses around to really warrant four days of racing that is truly at elite champion level. There are too many races and three days would be more than enough.

There has been talk this week of the next potential Cheltenham switch: running the meeting from Wednesday to Saturday. Who knows whether that will come to fruition, but it will again only serve as window dressing to the real issues with the meeting.

We all know the likelihood of us ever getting back to three days, though.

You can in fact have too much of a good thing.