ONE of the biggest moments of the year came off the racecourse, when in October, the Jockey Club confirmed that after a review, the Cheltenham Festival will remain a four-day meeting.

Earlier in the year the same organisation had announced a consultation would take place and the vast majority of racing stakeholders, pundits and fans felt a five-day festival was inevitable, despite a huge swell of negative opinion concerning such a move.

However, it just goes to show you that fan power still counts for something against commercial values, much like how football rebelled against the advent of the European Super League.

There was widespread delight at the Jockey Club’s decision but the whole event should not mask the problems the Cheltenham Festival and National Hunt racing has.

At the last three festivals you could have filled three cards with races of odds-on favourites. At the beginning of the millennium, when the festival was still three days, it was rare to have one odds-on favourite.

There were just four runners in the Turners Novice Chase this year, all of them Irish-trained and two of them barely even tried. The Festival has become way too excessive. It’s bloated with unnecessary races that only serve to dilute the overall quality further.

There are seven or eight races you could take off the festival straight away; all three mares’ races, the Turners, the Ryanair, any of the handicaps and the Champion Bumper.

That last-named race might irk a few people but why do we need championship race for bumper horses? These races are essentially training races, designed to give horses experience on the racecourse without having to jump. Yet many of the top bumper horses are coming from point-to-points so have already jumped fences.

Owners and trainers are more than willing to spend a year running in flat races with top three-mile chasing prospects because there is a Cheltenham Festival-shaped carrot dangled in front of them.

That goes back to the link between Cheltenham and the season as a whole, this is the effect. The symbiotic link has become ever stronger because Cheltenham shapes the season. Everything is geared towards it, to the detriment of some of the traditionally popular races on the calendar in the first half of the season.

All you have to do is look at some of the prices paid for the top point-to-point horses now. It’s obscene. It’s more than likely Cheltenham is to the forefront of all these owners’ minds. The brand has become all encompassing, so much so, it seems any race there will do, but if we keep driving the quality down, it’s just a race to the bottom.

Indeed, it seems some racing fans have started to vote with their feet already, with the Racing Post and Irish Daily Mirror recently reporting that lots of Brits are set to swerve Cheltenham this year in favour of a trip to the Dublin Racing Festival, amidst the soaring costs of tickets and accommodation in the Cotswolds.

It was pleasing to see good crowds at Leopardstown over Christmas and if that is the case for the DRF, of course that is a positive for Irish racing.

The price of a weekend pass for the 15 races in Dublin is €50, which wouldn’t be half the price of a Club Enclosure ticket at Cheltenham. Couple that with small field sizes in the Grade 1s and the increasingly uncompetitive nature of those races and it’s no wonder people are being put off.

It’s positive for racing ain Ireland, but Cheltenham is the bigger picture. It is the biggest shop window for our sport, the event most likely to turn a casual fan into a regular. We need to be at its brilliant best, with the best horses taking each other on.