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It’s not just the horses and the crowds. I love Cheltenham because the normal rules don’t apply

Cheltenham is a town of peeling stucco, imperial avenues and festivals. There are famous events for jazz and books, science and classical music – and then this week, and for me the best of all, the annual four-day jump race meeting.

Highbrow to lowbrow, some might sneer: 50,000 inebriates all cheering a field of small men on large horses. But the Cheltenham Festival, which ends today with the Gold Cup, is more than that because, unlike so much modern sport, it hasn’t been drained of life by commerce, with the spectator reduced to an item in a business transaction and the thrills distilled and predictable.

You don’t watch the festival. You really do take part as well: you cheer, stamp, shout, sing, bet and drink. You can cross the course and stare up the famous final hill whose punishing incline is disguised by television – a freedom that will hopefully survive the idiotic protester who ran on to the course during a race yesterday. You can almost touch the horses as they walk on to the course from the parade ring; and look up at jockeys who take huge risks but get few of the rewards loaded on the mollycoddled football superstars.

Without its crowd, Cheltenham would be nothing. I doubt there is any more joyous or energising experience on the planet this week than standing, as I did, in the happy company of others, screaming support as the winners and losers come home. This is an event largely without malevolence: not tribal, or angry. Everyone is more or less on the same side which is why despite the crowds (a quarter of a million people over four days) there isn’t much need for security or control. It can be a bit shambolic, mournful even as the drunks roll home poorer after the last race of the day, but there is a strong sense of collective human experience.

Escapism is often used as a derogatory term, but this grim spring we should value events that allow us to run away for a time from the world’s troubles.

Millions of people are now queueing up online with their credit cards to buy seats for the Olympics in London. “The greatest tickets on earth”, organisers claim – but I doubt this slick multibillion-pound event will match the raw joy to be found at a shabby racecourse by a gridlocked road outside a town in the west of England.

Britain, I suspect, can be broken into two parts: one that has never heard of the Cheltenham Festival and one that adores it. Ireland – which, as everyone always says, is part of what gives the festival its spirit – is different. There everyone knows about Cheltenham. But to the British it is a secret world: a club that draws out the sort of people for whom metropolitan fashions matter little. It is classless, in that it mixes classes with none of the pretension attached to the great fixtures of summer flat racing, events as horribly flashy as gold and crystal on a designer Swiss watch.

Cheltenham is more about mud than money. Yes, huge amounts are bet, the best horses are expensive, and only millionaires can afford to train them. But jump racing isn’t a rich industry or even a financially viable one – especially after the Irish financial crisis – and the connection between the amateur sport and the best is strong. From time to time, the National Velvet tale of the homebred nag who steals victory from the favourite comes true.

Of course there are risks, to the horses – some, happily not many, are injured or killed – and to the jockeys, whose bodies are battered and whose every bone looks in danger of being broken. It can’t be denied that the risk is part of the thrill: if jump racing were safe it would be dressage.

But I don’t think the attraction is the cruelty; rather the sense that mundane rules that apply to so much else about life are lifted for a time. In that sense Cheltenham is liberated, a place that really doesn’t have too much to do with officialdom. It is everything the smart middle classes claim for the Glastonbury Festival, a step out of usual life – except that I think Glastonbury’s claim to anarchy is contrived. If you really want to tune in, turn on and drop out, come to Cheltenham.

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Be Sociable, Share!

• 

It’s not just the horses and the crowds. I love Cheltenham because the normal rules don’t apply

Cheltenham is a town of peeling stucco, imperial avenues and festivals. There are famous events for jazz and books, science and classical music – and then this week, and for me the best of all, the annual four-day jump race meeting.

Highbrow to lowbrow, some might sneer: 50,000 inebriates all cheering a field of small men on large horses. But the Cheltenham Festival, which ends today with the Gold Cup, is more than that because, unlike so much modern sport, it hasn’t been drained of life by commerce, with the spectator reduced to an item in a business transaction and the thrills distilled and predictable.

You don’t watch the festival. You really do take part as well: you cheer, stamp, shout, sing, bet and drink. You can cross the course and stare up the famous final hill whose punishing incline is disguised by television – a freedom that will hopefully survive the idiotic protester who ran on to the course during a race yesterday. You can almost touch the horses as they walk on to the course from the parade ring; and look up at jockeys who take huge risks but get few of the rewards loaded on the mollycoddled football superstars.

Without its crowd, Cheltenham would be nothing. I doubt there is any more joyous or energising experience on the planet this week than standing, as I did, in the happy company of others, screaming support as the winners and losers come home. This is an event largely without malevolence: not tribal, or angry. Everyone is more or less on the same side which is why despite the crowds (a quarter of a million people over four days) there isn’t much need for security or control. It can be a bit shambolic, mournful even as the drunks roll home poorer after the last race of the day, but there is a strong sense of collective human experience.

Escapism is often used as a derogatory term, but this grim spring we should value events that allow us to run away for a time from the world’s troubles.

Millions of people are now queueing up online with their credit cards to buy seats for the Olympics in London. “The greatest tickets on earth”, organisers claim – but I doubt this slick multibillion-pound event will match the raw joy to be found at a shabby racecourse by a gridlocked road outside a town in the west of England.

Britain, I suspect, can be broken into two parts: one that has never heard of the Cheltenham Festival and one that adores it. Ireland – which, as everyone always says, is part of what gives the festival its spirit – is different. There everyone knows about Cheltenham. But to the British it is a secret world: a club that draws out the sort of people for whom metropolitan fashions matter little. It is classless, in that it mixes classes with none of the pretension attached to the great fixtures of summer flat racing, events as horribly flashy as gold and crystal on a designer Swiss watch.

Cheltenham is more about mud than money. Yes, huge amounts are bet, the best horses are expensive, and only millionaires can afford to train them. But jump racing isn’t a rich industry or even a financially viable one – especially after the Irish financial crisis – and the connection between the amateur sport and the best is strong. From time to time, the National Velvet tale of the homebred nag who steals victory from the favourite comes true.

Of course there are risks, to the horses – some, happily not many, are injured or killed – and to the jockeys, whose bodies are battered and whose every bone looks in danger of being broken. It can’t be denied that the risk is part of the thrill: if jump racing were safe it would be dressage.

But I don’t think the attraction is the cruelty; rather the sense that mundane rules that apply to so much else about life are lifted for a time. In that sense Cheltenham is liberated, a place that really doesn’t have too much to do with officialdom. It is everything the smart middle classes claim for the Glastonbury Festival, a step out of usual life – except that I think Glastonbury’s claim to anarchy is contrived. If you really want to tune in, turn on and drop out, come to Cheltenham.

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•