The Course

The Course

Cheltenham Courses

Prestbury Park is a beautifully crafted sporting arena, carved within the Cotswold Hills in Gloucestershire and the courses are unlike those at any other racecourse. Undulating and stamina sapping, the sting in the tail regularly comes at the end of each contest in the form of the supremely challenging “Cheltenham Hill” – an ever-upward climbing passage runners must scale from the last obstacle to the winning line. Every weapon in a competitor’s arsenal is needed for victory at Cheltenham.

The Festival uses all three of Cheltenham’s courses. The Old Course stages racing on the first two days of the meeting, with the New Course taking over for days 3 and 4. Since the Festival changed to a 4 day meeting in 2005, the amount of ground available to race on has been increased.

The fences on the New Course have also recently been widened by 5 metres, which gives the racecourse the flexibility to use the outside portion of them during the early part of the season, saving around 12 metres of entirely fresh ground (and fence) on the inside of the New Course specifically for the Festival.

The unique cross country course is used for the Cross Country Handicap at the Festival.

New Course

The New Course has two fences in a longer home straight than the Old Course, but only one fence on the downhill run. This obviously can still be tricky, for similar reasons to the two downhill fences on the Old Course, but a key obstacle here used to be four out. Taken at the top of the hill as the horses start to turn left, it often used to catch out even the most seasoned chasers given that the course fell away to the left immediately after the fence. However, the fence has now been moved back 15 metres meaning it is jumped on a slightly flatter part of the track.

As well as testing a horse’s jumping to the limit, the longer run-in on the New Course, up the famous Cheltenham hill, will ruthlessly expose any chinks in a horse’s stamina.

The New Course also has a rather unusual layout to its hurdles track given that there are only two flights in the last seven furlongs. Two out, on the downhill run, is about half-a-mile from home leaving a near three furlongs run to the final flight in the home straight. Also, in the Triumph and County Hurdles, contestants cross eight flights of hurdles, but the first is only a matter of strides from the start. It can, therefore, catch horses cold, before they have got into any sort of rhythm.