The Cheltenham festival’s feature races, including the Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle, have been moved back 30 minutes and will have 4pm starts in 2025.
On Friday, the Jockey Club, which owns Cheltenham, revealed their running order for this season’s festival with the four big championship prizes pushed back 30 minutes and repositioned as the fifth contest in seven-race programmes.
“The publication of the order of running today follows on from the changes announced last month and sees the feature race now taking place later in the card each day, allowing the sense of excitement and anticipation to build through the afternoon,” said the Jockey Club’s Ian Renton.
He also confirmed that terrestrial television viewers will be able to see an extra festival race with ITV covering six of the seven contests.
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Cheltenham’s first fixtures of the National Hunt season continue on Saturday with 20 Irish-trained horses declared across the seven races. They include Gavin Cromwell’s Bottler’secret in a conditions hurdle.
The burgeoning jumps campaign is underlined at home by a busy bank holiday weekend’s action with just a single flat fixture on Monday. That’s the final leg of a three-day schedule that winds up Galway’s 2024 action.
The sense of seasons changing is added to with the clocks going back an hour this weekend, with a 12.55pm start to Sunday’s action at Ballybrit, less than 10 minutes before the first at Wexford.
Jack Kennedy being sidelined through suspension means Sam Ewing could enjoy a profitable weekend starting with a potential trio of hopes, Kish Bank, Sporting Glory and Will Do, on Saturday.
In other news, the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) has opted to take no further action after concluding its investigation into the controversial late withdrawal of Petrol Head from the Guinness Galway Hurdle during the summer.
A lengthy investigation into the positive drug test that prompted officials to order the Katy Brown trained ante-post favourite be taken out of the €270,000 highlight just hours beforehand has concluded that clenbuterol found in a hair sample taken from Petrol Head was administered for therapeutic purposes when the horse was in the care of his former owner.
Petrol Head was formerly owned and trained by Ronan McNally who was disqualified by the IHRB last year. Clenbuterol is banned on race day but is a widely used respiratory medication.
After Galway, the IHRB said Brown provided a copy of a prescription noting ventipulmin, which contains clenbuterol, indicating the administration of the product earlier in the year when Petrol Head was reported to have been in the care of his owner.
