Fixing the Cheltenham Festival - but is minor surgery or a major overhaul required?

Whither the Cheltenham Festival? There's a question we never used to ask, in the good old days when one of the few things we could take for granted was the huge annual success of jump racing's marquee meeting.

There have always been arguments about this or that detail but there was no particular heat to those discussions for as long as people kept turning up and tuning in to enjoy the party, as they did when the post-Covid festival of 2022 was absolutely jam-packed with 280,627 racegoers over four days.

Just two years later, though, we're down to 229,999, with Wednesday's crowd dipping below 50,000. Suddenly, the festival is being dragged into the bath of self-doubt in which horseracing has always wallowed for the other 11 months of the year. Its critics are emboldened. It would take a long time to list all the quick fixes that have been suggested.