The Irish Champions Festival needs life-saving surgery - and only bundles of cash and energy can save it

Maybe we're expecting too much. Maybe an attendance of 10,135 at Leopardstown for day one of the Irish Champions Festival was perfectly respectable. It was on a par with the same day in 2023, after all. Maybe getting 8,849 through the gates for day two at the Curragh was a terrific achievement, 204 more than the year before. Progress. Maybe the combined crowd of 18,984 for our mid-September shindig was as many as we could have hoped for. Maybe we should be chuffed with our lot and maybe the whole occasion is actually maximising its potential.

Or, here's another theory. Maybe it's not.

There were 23,339 at Doncaster last Saturday. Yorkshire folk love their racing and Britain is a much bigger nation, so it's not comparing apples with apples when you put that figure alongside Leopardstown. But it's not comparing apples with Chinese crispy duck either. There were 11,703 people at Kempton for the King George last Christmas, yet 16,954 made their way to Leopardstown on the same day.