Cheltenham Festival switch to Saturday a gamble not worth taking
FESTIVAL SWITCH: Cheltenham saw an increased attendance at its season-opening Showcase meeting over the weekend. Picture: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile
For the fourth year running, Cheltenham saw an increased attendance at its season-opening Showcase meeting over the weekend, as 31,125 racegoers made their way to the home of jumps racing. The total was a record since what was previously a midweek meeting moved to a Friday/Saturday slot in 2007, while the 21,113 crowd on Saturday was also a record for the second day of the meeting.
It was a very positive start, in other words, to Guy Lavender’s first full season as the chief executive at Cheltenham, and the man tasked with turning around the sudden — and still largely unexplained — slump in attendance at the Festival meeting over the last three years.
Lavender, who joined Jockey Club Racecourses after a seven-year stint as chief executive of the MCC, spent much of Friday and Saturday touring the enclosures to get feedback from spectators on the changes to the customer experience that he has implemented so far, such as the removal of most restrictions on the areas where racegoers can consume alcohol and (small) reductions in the price of a pint.
And he was also, perhaps, sounding out early reactions to an idea which was initially floated in the Racing Post last week, that the festival meeting should switch from its current Tuesday-to-Friday slot to a Wednesday-to-Saturday schedule instead.
There was little detail — in fact, no detail at all — about specifics, such as whether the Gold Cup would be staged on Friday or Saturday, but it was enough to set a hare running and the Post’s pages were filled with — largely negative — responses from its readers for the rest of the week.
Every fan of jumping has their own personal relationship with the Festival, their own set of memories of springtime days of triumph and disaster and, in the case of many regular Festival racegoers, the cast of characters that shared those indelible moments with them. You tinker with it at your peril, in other words, and there are still many who have yet to fully accept the move from three days to four in 2005.
At the same time, however, there is no escaping the fact that the festival is not only the biggest money-spinner of the year for Jockey Club Racecourses — which is, in turn, the sport’s biggest commercial operator — but it has also managed to shed nearly a quarter of its record 2022 attendance of 280,627 in just three years.
It is a situation that needs to be addressed, and Lavender is at too early a stage of his Cheltenham tenure — and also too experienced — to rule anything out entirely.
“The Festival is one of British sport’s crown jewels, so it is only right that we regularly review every aspect of it and evaluate ideas and options,” Lavender said.
“As a new CEO of any business, it is completely natural to explore and consider all opportunities that may lead to growth. It is important to stress that at this stage the suggestion of a Wednesday to Saturday Festival is nothing more than an idea and we are nowhere near making a decision of this magnitude.
“A change like this would only happen after consulting with stakeholders, detailed modelling work and careful consideration of all data available to us.”
The fact that Saturday’s card alone drew almost the exact number of spectators that attended the last two-day Showcase in 2006 could also be seen as a sign that weekends work best for the modern racegoer.
The live audience, though, is only a part of the calculation, and a personal view would be that those who are fretting about more upheaval to their festival traditions are probably worrying about nothing.
Why? Because many of the issues that, taken as a whole, eventually led to the track deciding against a five-day festival ending on Saturday apply equally to a Wednesday-to-Saturday meeting.
Gold Cup Friday is, and seems likely to remain, a sell-out, including in the corporate hospitality chalets which account for a relatively small percentage of the overall attendance but a much greater chunk of the track’s margin on tickets. There would be little or no corporate revenue on a festival Saturday, while ITV Racing’s coverage would almost certainly be shunted to ITV4 to accommodate the Six Nations’ rugby.
And the competition from the rugby is not limited to the TV ratings. When the second day of the festival was abandoned due to high winds in 2008, any suggestion of extending to Saturday was swiftly ruled out because many of the huge army of temporary staff working at the meeting were already booked to be at Twickenham on Saturday afternoon.
It was the same story every time the idea of a five-day Festival resurfaced. When the numbers are crunched, and even before accounting for the added competition from Premier League football at a pivotal stage of the season, it turns out that there are both practical and commercial reasons why it does not make sense to stage two huge and historic sporting events within 100-or-so miles of each other on the same Saturday afternoon.
It also seems only fair to see how Lavender’s more subtle but still significant tweaks, such as the relaxation of the alcohol ban in front of the stands, play out. Having seen countless racegoers being told that “you can’t bring your drink through here” during trips to and from the paddock down the years, I can’t help but think that the new regime will be a big positive for that all-important word-of-mouth PR.
There is no single, simple solution to get the crowds back to the Festival. There is nothing so fundamentally awry with the meeting as it is, however, that a shift to a Wednesday-to-Saturday festival feels even close to being a gamble worth taking.
