After plenty of calls for change, Cheltenham Festival bigwigs have responded by giving the race programme a fresh lick of paint for next year’s mega meet.
The headline news is that the Grade 1 Turners Novices’ Chase – won by Grey Dawning in 2024 – has been given the chop and a novices’ handicap chase will take its place, while tweaks have been made to a number of other renewals.
There has been plenty of noise on social media about the changes, but there’s one man who’s opinion is worth listening to and that is Paddy Power’s very own Ruby Walsh – the most-successful jockey in Cheltenham Festival history.
It was just our luck then that Ruby featured on the latest episode of our From The Horse’s Mouth podcast to deliver his verdict on the alterations. You can listen to the episode in full below.
Ruby Walsh:
“The changes were made for the right reasons, they are well thought out and well founded.
“The idea is to try and make the Festival as competitive as it can be and as inclusive as it can be – and I think the changes are the right thing.
“Some people will think they’re not enough, some people will think they’re too much, but you have to be brave enough to make changes and Cheltenham have.
“The Turners Novices’ Chase is obviously gone and the slot will be filled by a novice handicap chase with no rating limit.
“The National Hunt Chase will now be for professionals and is a novice handicap chase for horses rated 0-145.
“The penalties are gone for the Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle and that will increase competition throughout the season and make other mares hurdle races competitive.
“Horses that run in a handicap hurdle will have to have made five starts over hurdles and that means you have to see horses more if they want to run in a handicap at the Festival. If they don’t get there it pushes horses out of the Martin Pipe and maybe the County or the Coral Cup and back into the novice races.
“Four runs over fences is not as big an issue because there’s two novice handicap chases now so it won’t be as hard on chasers.
“The Cross Country becoming a limited handicap chase is a good idea, too.
“I think they’re all good ideas. Some people think they should have gone further, you can always do more again, but I think they’ve done the right thing now.”
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