THE CHELTENHAM FESTIVAL
March · Prestbury Park, Cheltenham · Four Days · Since 1911
The Cheltenham Festival is four days of jump racing in March and the championship of the sport. Twenty-eight races, the best horses in Britain and Ireland, and something approaching three hundred thousand people across the week.
It is the second largest race meeting in Britain after Royal Ascot, and it is nothing like Royal Ascot.
The Riot
Cheltenham raced on Cleeve Hill from 1815, on the down above the town, and by the 1820s the meetings had acquired a reputation: heavy betting, heavy drinking, and trouble between the town and its visitors.
The Rector of Cheltenham preached against it. In 1829 his congregation acted on the sermon. They rioted, and they burned the grandstand on Cleeve Hill to the ground.
Racing moved down off the hill to Prestbury Park, where it has stayed. Which means the most important jumps course in the world sits where it does because a clergyman objected to it.
The National Hunt Chase began at Market Harborough in 1860 and moved about for fifty years, mostly to Warwick. It came to Prestbury Park permanently in 1911, and that is where the Festival as it now exists begins. The Gold Cup was added in 1924 and made the centrepiece four years after that.
The Hill
The course is left-handed, undulating, and it finishes uphill.
That last detail is the whole of it. Most racecourses finish flat or downhill, so a horse in front at the last stays in front. Cheltenham asks for half a mile of climbing after the final fence. Horses that looked beaten come back and horses that looked certain stop, and more races change here in the last two furlongs than anywhere else in the sport.
Then there is the noise. As the tape rises for the first race of the week the crowd produces a sound known simply as the Cheltenham roar. It lasts perhaps twenty seconds and it carries down to the town.
What to Know
The Irish come, and they come in numbers. Thursday is St Patrick’s Thursday, the British and Irish yards contest a trophy across the week, and the Guinness figures run past two hundred thousand pints. Cheltenham in March is an Anglo-Irish occasion staged in Gloucestershire, which is what separates it from Ascot.
Each of the four days has a character. Tuesday is Champion Day and holds the roar. Wednesday is the dressing day. Thursday belongs to the Irish. Friday is the Gold Cup.
Country attire, and it is the real thing here rather than a costume. It rains, the ground is Gloucestershire clay, and anyone in town shoes regrets it by the second race.
The hill is worth climbing. Walk to the top of the course and watch a chase come down towards you. It is the only place from which you understand what the fences are actually asking.
The Court
The Cheltenham Festival is not the Court’s own. Boxes, enclosure badges and rooms in a county that has too few of them are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. Gloucestershire fills entirely for the week, and members are generally better served staying out towards Stow or Cirencester.
