by The Gold Cup winner, who may still be among the greats, was a great way to end the biggest racing week of the year on Friday, and also great pre-publicity for the Cheltenham Festival in 2025, when Galopin Des Champs, all good, try to become the fifth horse in National Hunt history to win a third Gold Cup.
The horse and his trainer, Willie Mullins, were the notable performers of the week – not surprising to anyone – and as Mullins himself admitted, the quality of the air under Galopin Des Champs is missing from his first two Golds. Cup winner, Al Boum Photo.
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The market feels it too. Although Al Boum Photo was a 6-1 shot for a third Gold Cup a few minutes after landing his second, and then 9-4 favorite when he was beaten behind Minella Indo in 2021, Galopin Des Champs around 11-4 for the hat-trick in March 2025 and is likely to get worse if he comes up fit and in form.
Next year’s Gold Cup could, in fact, be one of the most anticipated renewals in years, given the quality of the novice players waiting this year. The French trainer Il Est Francais, who destroyed his field in the Kauto Star Novice Chase at Christmas but was steered around this year’s Festival to focus on the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris in May, is expected to focus on Cheltenham in 2025, and Gray Dawning, one of Dan Skelton’s four winners last week in the Turner’s Novice Chase, could easily develop into the leading British-based contender.
Then there is Mullins’s Fact To File, the emphatic winner of Wednesday’s Brown Advisory Novice Chase, who is just a point behind Galopin Des Champs in the pre-post betting. He put the race to bed with an exceptional jump at the last and then drove away from Monty’s Star up the hill, looking tailor-made for the extra quarter mile in the Gold Cup.
It looks like there will be another sell-out crowd for the final day of next year’s Festival. However, the disappointing crowd figures over the first three days this week must be a significant concern for an event that has been going from strength to strength for a quarter of a century or more.
The unexpected loss of class champion Constitution Hill from the opening day schedule was a huge disappointment and well beyond the control of the organisers. It was probably inevitable that the Festival’s attendance would drop slightly in 2023 after record crowds returned to the track during the post-Covid bounce in 2022.
Worryingly, however, the 4.4% year-on-year decline at last week’s meeting was well below the 14% fall in 2023 in the number of people who paid out the number on Friday. The total for the week rose by 69,129 to 229,999 – but still less than 18% less than the record figure of almost 281,000 in 2022.
Many possible explanations have been put forward for this sudden decline in the Festival’s drawing power. Most focus on potential disappointment with the racing product on the track, or alternatively, with the overall Festival experience.
Product issues include a dilution of quality and competitiveness as a result of the Festival’s steady growth from 19 races over three days to 28 over four, and the increasing dominance of Irish-trained horses and form lines, not only in terms of winners only represented, too. Ireland had the majority of runners last week for the third year running, having had just under a quarter of the field 10 years ago. Mullins’ promotion, and not just the favorite but the top two or three of the top four in the betting for some races, also adds to an increased sense of predictability.
The obvious experience issue, meanwhile, is its price, with the country still grappling with a cost-of-living crisis. Ticket prices are only a fraction of the total for most competitors, with transport, food, beer at £7.50 a pint and the likely cost of a few bets must be factored into the mix. The horrendous – and, in taxis, eye-wateringly expensive – process of getting from the station to the track and back again is also a big deal breaker, with those who decide to drive and pay at least £20 out of the privilege. Can’t be absolutely sure that they will be able to drive away again later.
It’s impossible to know from the bare figures how many individual Festival goers have been lost since 2022, as hardcore fans and annual members are counted repeatedly throughout the week. But it is still clear that there are at least thousands of people who went to the Festival in 2022 and decided that it was not an experience they wanted to repeat.
Cheltenham seemed rather sanguine about the situation on Friday evening, with Ian Renton, the track’s managing director, pointing to strong hospitality numbers as a counter to “slightly lower numbers in terms of general admission”. Hospitality sales, however, are all about the experience, giving clients the privilege of attending a world-class sporting event.
If the idea is accepted that the Festival has lost its joy, then even if or when the mood and the economy begin to improve, a day out in the west may still be an increasingly difficult sell.
