'There's no significant rain on the horizon' - Cheltenham outlook remains dry through festival week

Officials are set to continue watering all three courses in the run-up to the Cheltenham Festival, with the prospect of significant rain both before or during the meeting receding further in the last seven days. 

Clerk of the course Jon Pullin and his team have applied 30 millimetres of water this far and, with the reliability of forecasts improving as the opening day of March 14 approaches, it looks likely that irrigation rather than rainfall will be the way they manage the going through the course of the festival as well as during the build-up. 

"The outlook remains predominantly dry from now through to the week itself," said Pullin on Sunday. "We might get some small amounts of rain but certainly nothing of any significance is in the forecast. There’s no significant rain on the horizon."

When asked if the outlook had changed in terms of what might fall during the course of the four days of racing, Pullin added: "It’s still far enough out that there might be some light rain about but it’s not of any significant volume."

The opening two days are run on the Old course before action switches to the New for Thursday and Friday. The cross-country course is used just once on Wednesday, but Pullin says all three tracks are receiving equal attention. 

The cross-country course at Cheltenham, which has had 30mm of water applied in recent weeksCredit: Edward Whitaker

"We've applied 30mm of irrigation so far to all three tracks; that’s Old, New and the cross-country," he said. "At this stage we’re very much intending to keep irrigating all three so that they are all in the best possible position for festival week."

The dry spell comes off the back of a summer and autumn in 2022 with historically low rainfall. 

When updating conditions a week ago, Pullin expressed the hope that warmer weather would help stimulate grass growth after two periods of heavy frosts in December and January, although the temperatures have yet to pick up.

Pullin said: "We’ve had some cold spells the last few nights and we could dip below zero again for the next three or four nights. We saw the benefit of the warm week we had two weeks ago, but unfortunately we’ve been cold since and these overnight frosts are certainly not helping with the recovery."

The aim for both Pullin and predecessor Simon Claisse over many years has been to start the festival on ground not appreciably faster than good to soft and in recent years mother nature has certainly done her bit in aiding with that. The last year when at least one of the four days did not feature soft or heavy in the description was 2017, a festival when the official description was good on both Thursday and Friday. 

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