The local media and local businesses are getting very excited in the Cheltenham area. Next week, it’s the Cheltenham Festival. “Four days of world-class racing at The Festival™, says the Jockey Club and who can argue with that? Not me. I don’t know the first thing about horse racing and I’m happy to keep it that way. And anyway, I’d not be welcome. The blurb says: “Gentlemen are advised to wear suits. Ladies should wear a cocktail dress. DO NOT WEAR JEANS.” It’s okay. There’s no need to shout. But they don’t need me anyway. The festival is worth £274 million to the local economy. So there. But there’s another reason I’d hate it: jump racing is a cruel sport.
Horse racing is a strange business, too. A sport in which the main participant has no idea it’s taking part in a sport in the first place. But no one cares. It’s the spectacle, the roar from the stands, the Guinness, the craic, the sounds of those hooves – it’s Cheltenham. What’s not to love? I can give you 117 reasons.
Since 2007, 117 horses have died at Cheltenham. I don’t know if that’s the highest number for any course but it’s certainly not the lowest. In 2022, the course managed to come joint fifth in the dead horse stakes with eight horses dying. Ah, you say: that’s a tiny number when compared with the sheer number of horses who have competed over that year, and so it is. But I can’t think of another sport where such a high number of its stars get killed.
In simple terms, a horse dies every two and a bit days with 2575 dying in the last 5840 days. It was when I heard that statistic, on top of all the others, when I thought, this isn’t sport, it’s a glorified knackers yard.
I won’t be excited when the media bandwagon rolls into Cheltenham next week and the Guinness starts to flow. I won’t watch it either because every time a large screen appears on the course, I know there’s a person putting a bullet through a fatally injured animal’s brain. I can’t pretend it’s not happening, as the TV director desperately tries to make sure the gory bit doesn’t appear on live television. In football, the commentator apologies “for any language you may have heard” whereas you don’t want to hear the racing commentator apologising for showing a horse’s brain being splattered across the turf.
You’ll see and read about all the jolly bits next week but not so much of the bad bits, although to be fair our local BBC news show Points West does occasionally point out news of the fatalities as part of the “and finally” aspect of the report. I rather like horses, but I don’t like racing and I don’t like gambling, which is to say losing money, so I’ll give Cheltenham a miss, as I give all other forms of horse racing a miss.
The big question for me will be “how many horses will die next week in the name of sport?” Not that it matters. After all, it’s worth £274 million to the local economy, so that’s all right.
