Speaking to Charlotte Greenway at Cheltenham on the day before its Festival, Jon Pullin issued a ground and weather update.
Here’s what Pullin had to say...
We’ve had to do little bits and pieces of watering.
We’d held off on the old course until this morning and I was hoping that we wouldn’t need to do anything, but it just tightened up a little bit more than we anticipated yesterday, so we’re doing some selective watering on the old course today to make sure that we keep ‘good to soft’ as the main going description.
Hopefully we can eliminate the good ground as it would be nice to start the meeting on ‘good to soft’ all over if we can.
We should be dry from now until after racing tomorrow, then there might be a little bit of rain around overnight on Tuesday into Wednesday. Forecasts are indicating somewhere between two and four millimetres of rain is possible.
We’re then dry through Wednesday itself and overnight into Thursday, when it looks like it’ll be dry through the morning, before another band of rain comes in during Thursday afternoon that’ll stay with us certainly until the early hours of Friday.
So, there’s a little bit more rain volume-wise, but not as much as had been predicted a couple of days ago.
The final hurdle is now between the last two fences on the chase course and that’s its usual position throughout the season.
Historically, for the Festival it would move beyond the last fence, but we’ve had an area of ground on the bend turning away from the stands that has been a little wetter than we wanted during the winter and if we put the hurdle in its usual Festival position it would’ve been difficult to find a nice racing line and give ourselves room for a move between days without avoiding that area.
By putting the hurdle back to its usual seasonal position, we’ve got a nice racing line that allows for a move if we need to do one between days.
I haven’t actually paced it out but, as I say, it’s in its usual position during the season so jockeys will be used to riding with it in this position. It’s nothing new and the difference its actually at most Festival when it comes forward.
Ticket sales are looking really good and we’re sold out on Friday, which is fantastic. We’ve seen increases across all days though.
It has been a focus of the team to increase and build on the successes of last year, which we knew was a bit of a reset from a customer experience point of view.
There were lots of things implemented for last year’s Festival that we hoped would have a positive impact going forward, and that certainly seems to have materialised.
We’re seeing that coming through in the tickets that have been purchased.
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