Horse Racing: Cheltenham Plan Third Course

Cheltenham is to consider building a third course on the inside of its two existing circuits as the track's management seeks to guarantee the best possible ground at National Hunt racing's showpiece venue.

Simon Claisse, Cheltenham's clerk of the course, said yesterday that the plans had reached the stage of "a feasibility study," while he also warned that punters should not dismiss the possibility that the going will be heavy at the Festival meeting in seven weeks' time.

Insulating blankets were laid around Cheltenham yesterday ahead of a series of overnight frosts that are expected to begin this evening, to ensure that the important Festival trials meeting at the course on Saturday will not be lost to the weather for the second year running. Such is the growing popularity and strength of the modern Cheltenham programme throughout the winter, however, that the current layout may eventually need to expand.

"We widened the course in several areas before we went to the four-day Festival, which enables us to produce fresh ground on the chase course on both the Thursday and the Friday," Claisse said yesterday.

"But if the weather continues to have more intense periods of rainfall and dry spells, and we are to continue to raise the quality of the surface we provide in March, then the only way we can do that is to have more running area.

"At the moment, the existing track between the service road and the perimeter fence is as big as it can be, so we're conducting a feasibility study at the moment into the possibility of a third hurdle course and a third chase course inside the existing New course."

A more immediate concern for punters, though, is Claisse's belief that the going could be heavy at the Festival in March. Many backers are convinced that testing conditions at Cheltenham in the spring are a thing of the past, and horses that win in hock-deep ground in January are likely to struggle on faster going at the Festival. Amaretto Rose, 12-1 for the Supreme Novice Hurdle despite an effortless win in the mud at Haydock on Saturday, is an obvious example.

"People have it in their minds that because of the drainage here, we will never get back to the sort of conditions we used to have," Claisse says, "but any meteorologist will tell you that the last seven or eight winters and probably more have been significantly drier than the 30-year long-term average.

"Even then, you only have to look back to 2001 to find a year when we would have had a heavy-ground Festival if we hadn't lost the meeting to the foot-and-mouth outbreak. This winter is now nearly as wet as that one, and the only drainage that's gone in since then is no more than a couple of hundred square metres of localised stuff to deal with localised problems."

The Cheltenham going is currently heavy ahead of this Saturday's meeting after 6mm of rain on Saturday night, though "apart from a bit of sleet and snow in the week, there shouldn't be much more coming".

Once that card is out of the way, Claisse will have just over six weeks to prepare for the Festival, which he hopes will begin on ground on the soft side of good. It remains an uncertain business, though, and the advice of John Kettley, the former BBC weatherman, will be central to his decisions.

"I've used John's forecasts for about five years now," he says. "To begin with, I found him to be less inaccurate than any other service, though to be fair to forecasters, it's very difficult to be entirely accurate when you are looking more than 24 hours ahead.

"Over the years he's developed an understanding of what is, in essence, a little bit of a microclimate here. The weather in Prestbury village, which is only about half a mile away, is often quite different from what we experience here, and even on the site itself, we have rain gauges all over the place and we find that rainfall levels can be markedly different from one part of the course to another.

"It's the same with the temperature, and not just according to which parts of the course are in the sun. The second fence in a two-mile chase, for example, is at the lowest part of the course, and it can often be three degrees colder there than it is at the fourth-last on the Gold Cup course."

Ron Cox's tip of the day


Magic Warrior 3.25 Kempton

A high draw on the inside can only be of assistance around these sharp clockwise bends and Magic Warrior is set to go well from stall 11 of 13. Since August, this gelding has produced form-figures of 1141 over today's course and distance, which may have been a 100% record but for an unlucky fourth. Not seen at his best when breaking a blood vessel last time, he can bounce back today.