Cheltenham

I was looking at the coverage of Cheltenham this week and had one of those slightly melancholy moments where you realise something familiar has quietly turned into something else.

Cheltenham used to be a racing festival. That was the point of it. Owners, trainers, punters and enthusiasts went because it was where the best National Hunt horses met. The betting was lively, the Guinness flowed, and everyone accepted that by the fourth race half the crowd would be cheerfully legless. But the horses were the centre of gravity. Everything else orbited around them.

Now the horses feel almost incidental.

Watch the television coverage and the camera keeps drifting away from the track to film groups of lads in novelty suits chanting at each other while carrying four pints each. There are pop up bars everywhere, hospitality villages the size of small counties, and betting firms pumping out offers every five minutes. Women appear in outfits that are too tight and too high, tottering on improbable heels, with teeny hats perched precariously on the back of their heads as if gravity has been temporarily suspended for the sake of fashion. It has the atmosphere of a corporate hospitality expo that happens to have a few racehorses passing by in the background.

None of this happened by accident. Racecourses discovered some time ago that a serious racing fan buying a ticket and placing a few bets is a perfectly decent customer, but a stag party drinking champagne in a hospitality marquee is a vastly better one. The arithmetic is obvious. Once the accountants have seen the numbers the direction of travel is pretty much guaranteed.

So Cheltenham gradually expanded the bars, expanded the hospitality, expanded the capacity and leaned hard into the idea of the festival experience. The result is that the meeting now resembles a four day alcohol and gambling carnival with occasional interruptions for racing.

The strange thing is that the racing itself is probably stronger than ever. The Irish yards arrive mob handed with extraordinary horses, the competition at the top end is fierce, and some of the races are genuinely historic contests. But if you dropped a new visitor into the middle of the grandstand and asked them what the event was about, horses would not be their first guess.

It is all rather hideous, really. A tweedy sporting occasion has quietly mutated into something closer to a travelling beer festival with a betting app attached.

The bookmakers will be delighted, the hospitality tents will be full, and the accountants at the Jockey Club will be nodding approvingly at the revenue figures.

Meanwhile somewhere out on the course a rather magnificent horse will be jumping the last fence in front of a crowd that is mostly looking down at its phone checking the odds for the next race.