Climate crisis gave Cheltenham a major headache – and more pain is coming

Even after two days of racing afflicted by dozens of non-runners due to the fast ground, the elements still had not quite finished with Cheltenham on Sunday, when the third day of the track’s November meeting went ahead only after a late inspection – to assess standing water on the course after several hours of rain.

A crowd of more than 10,000 racegoers, swelled by a big contingent of students from the specialist racing events organiser INVADES, had largely assembled when the inspection was announced, and while the course was passed fit for racing 15 minutes later, it was another uncomfortable moment for all concerned at the end of a tricky three days in the west country.

The November meeting is second only to the festival here in March in terms of its significance and popularity, and its crowd figures have also held up well at a time when the festival has been struggling to maintain its attendance. Saturday’s crowd of 32,618 was 2k up on last year, but they did not get entirely what they were expecting as there were no fewer than 29 non-runners on the day, almost all of which were ground-related.

That followed nine non-runners on Friday, and there were another 15 on Sunday. Friday’s card, meanwhile, also saw three slips by runners on the final bend, while several hurdles were omitted in a later race due to the low-lying sun. And all this after Cheltenham cancelled its final three racedays last season and then spent a significant sum to replace a drainage pipe in the home straight after a hole appeared in the track at the Trials meeting in late January.

The extent to which the racegoers allowed any of this to impinge on their day out is difficult to say. They certainly seemed to be having a good time, not least when Meetmebythesea, the favourite, landed some meaty bets in the Paddy Power Gold Cup on Saturday. The ever-popular Jonbon’s win in the Shloer Chase a day earlier was a heart-warmer too, and my guess at least would be that a significant proportion of Saturday’s crowd were already planning to return in 12 months’ time as they headed for home.

But for the owners and trainers of horses that missed out – because a track with a top-end watering system had good-to-firm in the going description in mid-November – the memory may be harder to shift.

Cheltenham is the home of National Hunt racing and there will never be another track to match it, but that also means that any runner there is the subject of huge excitement and anticipation for its owners for weeks, or probably months, beforehand. If they then find themselves having to withdraw a fit horse because the ground is too fast, the frustration could be such that, as Willie Mullins warned last week, owners will start to look towards Aintree and Punchestown in the spring instead.

Perhaps a greater concern for Cheltenham, though, after its “one-thing-after-another” weekend, is that it is very hard to point to anything that Jon Pullin, the clerk of the course, could have done to avoid it. He could not water the course on Thursday or Friday evening because the temperatures were forecast to get well below freezing – which they did – while the slips on Friday were apparently down to moisture brought to the surface by a light overnight frost.

Pullin cannot change the ambient or overnight temperature, or the amount of rainfall at a track where the gauges at different parts have been known to register different readings.

“It’s another acknowledgement that we as a racing industry have that the climate is changing,” Pullin told ITV Racing over the weekend. And the really bad news for Pullin and all his fellow clerks of the course is that climate science does not simply predict that the planet is warming up, but also that this will result in more extreme weather patterns. Cheltenham’s issues over the weekend were not simply the result of low rainfall over the last two weeks, but over the last six months or more.

When ground changes, meanwhile, it can change rapidly, and the jockeys were coming home caked in mud at the end of the card on Sunday. That was, at least in part, down to the 8mm of water applied overnight on Saturday, but also because a forecast of 2-3mm of natural rainfall ahead of racing turned out to be 12mm.

Again, it is hard to see what else Pullin could have done. It is not like ordering a steak medium-rare and then sending it back for another minute each side if it arrives looking too bloody. Watering remains a controversial topic for some punters, but it is a vital part of the clerk’s armoury to ensure that racing takes place at all, and will become more important still due to climate change.

Ludlow abandoned its entire 2026-27 season last week due to the effects of the summer drought. Exeter and Wincanton both lost their biggest days of the season for the same reason. Taunton, Kempton and Leicester have lost meetings too. So while it looked a little touch-and-go on Sunday lunchtime, Cheltenham got all three days into the form book and thin fields or not, many racegoers left with memories to treasure.

We live, sadly, in a blame culture where somebody needs to be held accountable for every setback or disappointment, but Pullin is working with a very delicate balance of competing risks using the best information at his disposal, in order to reach what is, in fact, quite a narrow window of success.

And that information not only proves to be way off the mark on a regular basis, but is also predicted to see wilder variations still over the years to come.

It is, quite simply, an impossible job, and while there were plenty of keyboard warriors boasting 20-20 hindsight queueing up to opine on Pullin’s actions over the weekend, my bet would be that few of them, were they in his shoes, would have done anything radically different.