Cheltenham week always divides people, like one of those American high school movies. Over in this corner, you have the real horsey folk, sturdy footwear mucking up the floor and the Racing Post spread out in front of them. Over in that one, you have the punters, cynical bastards when it comes to basically everything in life except hopeful word of a tip.
Out the back, you have the sneers who make a point of declaring themselves above it all. I have friends who will watch any sport on any channel at any time and yet Cheltenham leaves them utterly cold. Horse racing in general, come to that. “Competitive farming,” was how one described it, delighted with himself.
In the middle, you have the floating sports fan, wandering free, trying to find a place to fit in. The great English sportswriter Simon Barnes liked to quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when people asked him what his favourite sport was to cover. When the stoned attorney in Hunter S Thompson’s book claims to be a professional motorcyclist, he is asked what team he rides for. “The really big f**kers,” comes the reply.
“Well,” writes Barnes in his timeless book The Meaning of Sport, “when it comes to watching sport and when it comes to writing about sport, I like the really big f**kers”. By which he means the Olympics, World Cups, Wimbledons, the Ashes and so on.
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And if we’re all honest about it, isn’t that what most of us are into? Grassroots, yes. Club game, sure. Friday night curry chips and a moan at the ref in the rain, absolutely. But when all comes to all and you have a couple of hours of your packed and varied life parcelled away for a bit of sporting release, it’s the really big f**kers that get us jiggy.
Cheltenham easily falls into that bracket. Capital R, capital B, capital F. It has long since eaten jumps racing whole and it takes the eye of the regular world in a way the rest of the game can’t. It’s horse racing for people who aren’t really into horse racing. Every sport needs an event like it, an easy shortcut into a whole subculture.
This is especially true of horse racing, which can feel so forbidding and unknowable when you come to it for the first time. Going any further than one flutter a year on the Grand National means you run face-first into jargon about a pull in the weights and listed maidens and getting done for toe and a million other pieces of assumed knowledge. It’s hard to get into a sport that makes you feel stupid.
Cheltenham is easy to understand. It can still make you feel stupid obviously but at least it offers you a way in. All sports fans have an immediate feel for winners and losers, favourites and underdogs, for big achievements that start in small places. Cheltenham has always been so good at telling stories about itself and even if plenty of it was mythmaking, it wasn’t hard to get on board.
Fifteen years ago this very week, I went to Grangemockler in Tipperary to interview a jockey called Brian O’Connell. He had only turned professional a few months beforehand and was down to ride a horse called Dunguib in the Supreme. Having won the Champion Bumper in fine style the previous year, Dunguib wasn’t just odds-on for the festival opener, he was already favourite for the following year’s Champion Hurdle. An Irish banker in the first race of the week.
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And in the middle of it was O’Connell, 23 years old and trying to find his feet. He had been an amateur rider when winning the bumper the previous year and now he was in the biggest spotlight of his life. “There’ll be a few sleepless nights between now and Tuesday and it will be nerve-wracking on the day but it won’t change the way I ride the horse,” he said.
Dunguib went off at 4-5 but never got into the race and eventually finished third. O’Connell came in for plenty of criticism for the ride – Dunguib was never up with the pace and ended up with too much to do when they turned for home. Whether or not the occasion got to the young jockey, only he knows. But for the floating sports fan watching on, the whole thing was incredible theatre.
Though it was only in 2010, it feels like a story from another age. Willie Mullins had just two winners all week. JP McManus only had one. Nowadays, it’s highly likely that a Dunguib would have been either bought by the latter or housed in the former’s yard long before it made the Champion Bumper, never mind lining up for the Supreme. And a Brian O’Connell would have been back in Grangemockler while Paul Townend or Mark Walsh cantered down to the start.
Cheltenham, like everything, has had its edges planed off as time has passed. The small yard stories don’t happen any more in the graded races and they’re pretty unheard of in the handicaps either. And so it’s harder for the floating sports fan to find the hook these days. Rachael Blackmore was it for a few years and if Galopin Des Champs completes the Gold Cup three in a row next Friday, maybe he will become a crossover star. But it feels unlikely.
Instead, what ends up filling the gap is the betting, the betting, the betting. Gambling was always ingrained in the Cheltenham experience and it’s a huge part of the fun. But since there are so few stories to tell any more outside of the biggest beasts in the jungle, everything gets shot through the prism of what to back, what to lay, what’s drifting on the exchanges, what to put in the multis.
Something has been lost along the way. The communal experience of Cheltenham feels like it has fizzled out a touch. The preview nights that were once such a rattling good night out are now mostly online. People are going to Benidorm to watch the races by the pool rather than buy overpriced tickets to the festival. Even the betting shops, which used to be heaving, raucous sweatboxes during Cheltenham week, are half empty now since everyone bets on their phone.
Plenty of us will still be glued to it. It’s still one of the really big f**kers on the sporting landscape and we lack the imagination to find something else to be at. But for plenty of reasons, Cheltenham doesn’t feel as vital as it used to. The thrill is gone.
At least for now.
