An outstanding Gold Cup winner who may yet rank among the all‑time greats was a fine way to conclude the biggest racing week of the year on Friday, and excellent pre-publicity too for the Cheltenham Festival in 2025 when Galopin Des Champs will, all being well, attempt to become only the fifth horse in National Hunt history to win a third Gold Cup.
The horse and his trainer, Willie Mullins, were – to no one’s great surprise – the standout performers of the week and, as Mullins himself acknowledged, there is a noticeable air of superstar quality about Galopin Des Champs that was lacking in his first dual Gold Cup winner, Al Boum Photo.
The market senses it, too. Al Boum Photo was a 6-1 shot for a third Gold Cup a few minutes after winning his second, and then 9-4 favourite when he was beaten behind Minella Indo in 2021, but Galopin Des Champs is about 11-4 to complete the hat‑trick in March 2025 and likely to be nudging odds-on if he turns up fit and in form.
The 2025 Gold Cup, in fact, could be one of the most eagerly anticipated renewals for years, given the quality of the staying novice chasers this year. The French-trained Il Est Francais, who obliterated his field in the Kauto Star Novice Chase at Christmas but was steered around this year’s Festival to target the Grand Steeple‑Chase de Paris in May, is expected to be aimed towards Cheltenham in 2025 while Grey Dawning, one of Dan Skelton’s four winners 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 the Brown Advisory Novice Chase on Wednesday, who is just a point behind Galopin Des Champs in the ante-post betting. He put the race to bed with an exceptional jump at the last and then powered away from Monty’s Star up the hill, looking tailor-made for the extra quarter-mile in the Gold Cup.
Another sell-out crowd for the final day of the Festival next year looks all but guaranteed. The disappointing crowd figures over the first three days this week, though, must be a significant concern for an event that has generally been going from strength to strength for a quarter of a century or more.
The unexpected loss of a champion of Constitution Hill’s class from the opening-day schedule was hugely disappointing and well beyond the organisers’ control. It was probably inevitable that Festival attendance would fall away a little in 2023 after the record crowds that flocked back to the track in the post-Covid bounce of 2022.
Southwell 1.55 Samourai One 2.25 Abaya Du Mathan 3.00 Strong Foundations 3.30 Livin On Luco 4.00 Young At Heart 4.30 Hostile Hotelier 5.00 I’m On My Way
Fontwell Park 2.13 All Authorized 2.45 Mumbo Jumbo 3.18 Sailing Grace 3.48 Mumbles 4.18 Mister Murchan 4.48 Twp Stori
Newcastle 5.30 Gold Aura (nb) 6.00 Plink (nap) 6.30 Golden Rainbow 7.00 Rishi 7.30 Cajetan 8.00 Child Of Lir 8.30 Zumaaty
A sizeable drop in attendance for the second year running, though, is a major worry, for all that the 4.4% year-on-year decline at the meeting last week was well below the 14% drop in 2023. The Friday sell-out crowd of 69,129 boosted the total for the week to 229,999 – but is still no less than 18% down on the record figure of nearly 281,000 in 2022.
Many possible explanations have been advanced for this sudden decline in the Festival’s pulling power. Most focus on either possible 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 just in terms of winners but representation, too. Ireland fielded the majority of runners this past week for the third year running, having had just under a quarter of the fields only 10 years ago. Mullins’s increasing pre-eminence, with not just the favourite but the top two or three of the top four in the betting for some races, also adds to a sense of increasing predictability.
The obvious experience issue, meanwhile, is its price, with the country still in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis. The price of a ticket is only a fraction of the whole for most racegoers, with transport, food, beer at £7.50 a pint and the likely cost of a few bets all needing to be factored into the mix. The miserable – and, in a taxi, eye-wateringly expensive – process of getting from the station to the track and then back again is also hugely demoralising, while those who decide to drive and pay at least £20 for the privilege cannot be entirely sure that they will be able to drive away again later.
It is impossible to know from the bare figures how many individual Festival racegoers have been lost since 2022, but there are still clearly several thousand people at least who went to the Festival in 2022 and decided that it was not an experience they were keen to repeat.
Cheltenham seemed fairly 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, though, are all about the experience, and giving clients a sense of privilege in attending an elite sporting event.
If the idea takes hold that the Festival has started to lose its lustre, then even if or when the general mood and economy starts to improve, a day out in the west country could still prove to be increasingly difficult to sell.
