Graham Cunningham wraps up day one of the 2025 Cheltenham Festival

6.30am: Let the Festival bingo begin

The second Tuesday in March dawns sharp and clear and the Festival bingo card fills rapidly as the RP’s Lee Mottershead helps set the scene for day one on Radio Four’s Today programme.

‘Christmas day, annual pilgrimage, magnificent sporting amphitheatre, Britain v Ireland rivalry.’

All we’re missing is ‘jump racing’s Olympics’ for a pre-breakfast full house then it’s back to a strange version of the real world for news of a BBC probe that shows medication for restless leg syndrome has been turning women into sex and gambling addicts.

10am: At your convenience

Cheltenham Spa station and there are some restless legs (and bladders) as early tipplers leg it for the loos. A vivacious staff member throws her arms up and shouts “this is the day we’ve waited for.” She’s not wrong.

12.30pm: Honouring a hero

A minute’s applause for Michael O’Sullivan. No great fuss, some stand and reflect, others walk and clap at the same time. Then we switch the real world off again and, as at every Festival since Arkle was a novice, it’s all about crucial moments.

1.20pm: Backed off the Bordes

Rumours that the Supreme banker might boil over in the preliminaries prove well wide of the mark as KOPEK DES BORDES settles perfectly and bounds clear of William Munny under Paul Townend.

William Munny’s trainer Barry Connell pays a handsome tribute to the late Michael and winning owner Charlie McCarthy – spurred on by the dream of this day during recent cancer troubles – sums things up in one line.

“It’s wonderful to be alive today,” he says. And it certainly is – unless you’re a bookmaker.

2.00: The return of Jango

But hang on.

The giant Majborough has come a long way in a short time but, without donning the Captain Hindsight cape, he’s five years of age with just five runs and two saloon passage chases behind him.

His heart is stout but his ale or jail technique finds him out badly with a jarring blunder at the second last and, in a race where four of five trade at odds on, JANGO BAIE comes from another postcode and splits foes to thwart the jolly, Only By Night and L’Eau Du Sud in one of the strangest Arkles on record.

Henderson celebrates an eighth Arkle, Willie and JP wonder what might have been, along with Cromwell and Skelton, but one thought persists.

How far would a hale and hearty Sir Gino have beaten this lot by?

2.30: Going the whole Hog

The resident brass band break into the Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’ and, given that the Ultima looks impossible, it’s time to check out the Festival food and beverage situation.

And I have questions:

Where is the incentive to abstain when a Guinness 0.0 is only 40p cheaper (£7.40 plays £7.80) than the traditional version?

And how in the world is a Vegan Hog Roast (twelve of your English pounds) 50p more expensive than the one with lashings of Hoggy in it?

Teetotal vegans – and I realise they are in a small minority this week - are getting the rough end of the pineapple but thanks to the three young staffers who gave me the lowdown on those crucial alcohol free Guinness numbers.

One youth said he had sold “about thirty so far.”

Another was nothing if not specific in saying she reckoned 0.0 sales were eight per cent of her total but salute to her colleague occupying an old school corner of the Guinness village who said: “I’m not going to lie, I didn’t even know we sold it!”

3.20: Mares’ Hurdle a Loss leader

Put it on the poll, Dave:

Is it worse to be booed in or greeted with the sort of applause more redolent of a prize giving for best vanilla sponge at the local garden fete?

Fears that late switcher LOSSIEMOUTH would be barracked if she won the Mares’ Hurdle came to nothing but if there’s ever been a more tepid welcome for a heavily backed G1 winner at the Festival then I can’t recall it.

Cheltenham took positive steps to revive the competitive nature of the Festival with changes to the Turners and the National Hunt Chase but they left the door wide open for Towswitchery by refusing to address the Mares’ Hurdle problem and Willie and Rich Ricci darted through it.

Willie insists Lossie hadn’t been working to her peak after that crunching Leopardstown fall and maybe he had a good idea she wasn’t ready for round two with the rugged State Man.

None of us will ever know what would have happened in other circumstances but this surely needs to be the last time a top-class filly ducks the Champion for a penalty kick – and the campaign to impose penalties on G1 winners in the Mares’ Hurdle starts (correction, continues) right now.

4.00: Ace is high

Faint heart never won fair lady, nor did it ever win a Champion Hurdle.

But how do you sum up four minutes that left Cheltenham in shock and Jeremy Scott and Lorcan Williams in dreamland as GOLDEN ACE showed that, just occasionally, the best form of ability is availability.

Hats off to owner Ian Gosden, who never wavered in his desire to aim high, and to the mare herself for taking full advantage when Constitution Hill and State Man crashed out.

But the 2025 Champion Hurdle will have several asterisks in the history books:

• How close would Lossiemouth have gone had she run in the race that was meant to have her name on it for the last two years?
• What sort of showdown would we have seen if Constitution Hill and State Man had jumped the third last and last fluently?
• And what sort of clouds would have gathered over this year’s Festival had worse come to worst for one of the previous two champs?

5.15pm: Absent friends

Taking the positive out of a tough situation is important if you can do it but the real world intervenes again as news from Cambridge Crown Court filters through on the bus back to the station.

I have no idea how John Hunt has managed to keep putting one foot in front of the other over the last nine months, still less how he managed to deliver that astonishing victim impact statement today.

You were much missed here today, John.

And, however long it takes, a lot of people are still praying there are brighter days ahead.

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