Cheltenham opens 2026-27 season after extensive drainage repairs
Cheltenham Racecourse will open its gates on Friday for the first card of the 2026-27 National Hunt campaign, six days after Ascot’s Champions Day, after an abrupt curtailment to the course’s previous season.
Racing returns following the discovery of a significant hole in the racing surface on Trials day in late January and a decision by the Jockey Club to sacrifice the mid-April meeting and the hunter-chase card in May to allow remedial work. The festival meeting in March went ahead as planned. More than a kilometre of drainage has been replaced or upgraded and the Old and New courses received a thorough examination with ground-penetrating radar, which showed no additional causes for concern.
“We’re really pleased with how the track has responded to the significant drainage works,” Jon Pullin, Cheltenham’s clerk of the course, said on Monday. “Our decision to cancel the last three racedays of last season in order to maximise the time to carry out the work and for the ground to recover was certainly the right one. “Everyone knows how long, hot and dry our summer was and the team here have been working tirelessly, just like grounds teams all over the UK, to irrigate and prepare the track ahead of our season opener.”
The Showcase meeting has evolved from a summer loosenener into one of Cheltenham’s more popular non-festival fixtures: as a two-day midweek meeting at the turn of the century it attracted 16,000 racegoers, while the Saturday card last year drew 21,113. That Saturday attendance was more than three times the crowd for the Flat card at Doncaster on the same afternoon featuring the Futurity Trophy.
Cheltenham races so sparingly over the winter that, in the main part of the season, there is said to be no longer any such thing as a minor day at the track. The loss of the three cards in April and May was judged a necessary trade-off to ensure the surface was fit for the return of racing in October.
Firm ground has already forced the abandonment of the cross-country race at the November meeting at Cheltenham, the latest in a sequence of jumps cancellations at courses including Kempton, Exeter, Ludlow, Fakenham, Warwick and Wincanton. Chepstow’s Welsh Racing Festival from 9 to 11 October was reduced to an all-hurdles meeting as a consequence of the prevailing conditions.
Cheltenham has a watering system but its capacity is limited; the going for this week’s meeting is officially good, having been good, good-to-firm in places on Sunday, and the taps have been turned off because of an unsettled forecast. “We had 8mm of rain overnight last night [Sunday into Monday] and expect some further rain tonight into tomorrow,” Pullin said. “As a result, and in light of the uncertain forecast for the end of this week, we’ve stopped watering. We’re good ground all over currently, but we’ll have to wait and see how much rainfall we get on Thursday and Friday before I can say with any real confidence what we’ll be when the tapes go up.”
Attendance at the festival has struggled since the post-Covid peak of 2022, although last season’s meeting recorded a modest increase after three years of decline; non-festival days have helped offset that trend, notably a turnout of 44,900 on New Year’s Day that was 232 below the total for the second day of the festival. To maintain competitiveness, Cheltenham needs large fields with fit, in-form horses and improving youngsters and novices moving up the pyramid; if this year’s long, dry summer becomes the norm the base of that pyramid could steadily erode. The long, dry summer was a boon for Champions Day at Ascot, which has often been staged on deep winter ground; for the country’s smaller jumps tracks, however, the climate crisis could increasingly be seen as an existential threat.
The next major fixtures on the jumps calendar are the West Country Weekend at Exeter and Wincanton on 6 and 7 November, featuring the Haldon Gold Cup and the Badger Beers Chase; both venues have already lost cards this season — Exeter has cancelled two — and organisers say there must be serious doubt about both days if the dry weather continues.