jasey  • February 25, 2014 8:28 PM GMT 


All i think about.
I thought i loved my mrs until i discovered  the Festival.


HA HA that's one of the best short comments iv ever read on here! sums it up in one line

That's strange 1st time poster I remember it was me who had the hour long fight for a drink and buy them for you in Arthur's Bar in Guiness village whilst you were chatting to Alan Brazil

cant have been me dont except drinks of strangers and you dont no where the bar is,

5K

Probably the best post on the whole forum from Roger last year - "It means the heartache of watching a kid like Jayne Mangan have the dream of her lifetime taken away from her in the twitch of Oscar Delta’s synapses, me writing to her to say how tough it must have been for her and receiving a beautiful letter back expressing her thanks but life was tougher for JT McNamara." is a genuinely emotional and poignant sentence.

You've inspired me to attempt to capture a fragment of my feelings about the Festival in words.

I suppose one of the best illustrations of what the Festival means to me is that in the last two years, I’ve taken up an exciting role within our online betting industry that I thoroughly enjoy and have done well at. There is massive scope within the company for me progress significantly and my career is well and truly in flight here for me – I’m 25 this year, so it’s all just beginning. However, when word got out that holidays would not be granted over the Festival period, I was instantly composing my resignation letter in my mind. Nothing would take away from me the one event that I literally work all year for; after all, what’s the point in working if I’m willing to sacrifice that?

Mercifully, my boss knows what Cheltenham means to me and has agreed to be complicit in my scheming to have the Festival off: turns out my brother is getting married that week – who’d have thought it?

The Festival means so many things to me like it does to everyone else, and I think one of the main things for me is the appreciation of animals that are born and exist basically to give us this enjoyment and this Festival. I really try not to lose sight of this amongst the orgy of punting – your handicap snip of the week might well have been pulled up 4 out, and you might well have had a maximum bet plus a bit more because it’s Cheltenham, and you might well be utterly gutted that the coup that was so nailed-on last week has been inexplicably scuppered. But try not to forget that whatever has won, whether it’s the well-punted fav or a 50/1 ‘rag’, the horse means so much to its close connections and having just been victorious on the biggest stage in racing, the beast deserves at the very least your clap and a moment of appreciation for its effort. I must confess some hypocrisy here though – it was at least the Chester May meeting until I could think about offering a moment of congratulations to Western bastard Warhorse for chinning Champagne Fever.

Outside of the obvious, and a touch more personal, the Festival has become, through my enthusiasm  and lack of a racing buddy to rely on each year, an event that my mother and I essentially plan our year around – though me more so than her, I’m sure.  Being mid-twenties and having long moved out of home, elder brother and sister who’ve long since done the same, and a father who has passed on I think for her, Cheltenham is half about the enjoyment of the event, and half one of the few remaining opportunities as her kids grow up that become one of hers and her son’s ‘things’. She isn’t particularly knowledgeable on racing – has only recently started to pay attention to the form figures next to a beast’s name, for example – but the beauty of Cheltenham and horse racing in general is that you don’t need to know anything to have an incredibly good time; you don’t need to know the effects of a wind operation to know that drinking jagerbombs and dancing to Irish music on Cheltenham Eve with a choca-block crowd all acting like hyperactively excited children is the best night of the year, neither do you need to be privy to the improvement yielded by a tongue-tie to clap, cheer, and appreciate new champions as they’re crowned by a crowd who are present to admire these wonderful animals at the peak of the powers they’re bred for. I will never forget, and often recall with real pleasure, the memory of my mother, as Al Ferof came storming up the hill in the Supreme Novices of 2011, yelling at him to “Stay on Al Ferof! Stay on!” I’d be odds-against that she had more than £2 on, but she couldn’t have been more excited or delighted if her receipt read £500. She works hard all year for peanuts basically, meaning that out of decency, I often leave the stakes of my bets undisclosed. Not that they’re large by any stretch of the imagination, but when Master Minded smashed up Voy Por Ustedes in the Game Spirit of 2010, she mused in response to my disappointment that I’d probably had “something stupid like twenty pounds” on. Naturally I didn’t correct her that I’d had £50, and I’ve been keen to keep stake amount under wraps since. Regardless of the disparity in scale of our stakes, especially at Cheltenham, any of her £1 each way punts can chin my larger bets all day long and it’d be impossible to get annoyed. Well, maybe not all day long…

So there might not be many pairings of mother and son at the Festival, but we’ll be there on the Monday night, drinking far more than we promised ourselves to at the start of the evening and feeling far worse than we intended on Tuesday morning. But we’ll be there in the stands at 1.29pm as excited as everybody else, and hoping that we have the privilege to scream “stay on!” at something up the hill.


It's the Spring Juvenile Hurdle on Sunday chaps - that means the Festival is right around the corner! As Duffy says, it's so important to cherish these next few weeks - it's a long year until we hit this point again!

Thanks joist...good luck to you both

Thanks Duffy, you too! Absolutely agree with your sentiment, is there a more depressing race in the calendar than the Midlands bloody National

Doing the Grand Slam this year, Warwick Sunday, Stratford, Festival 4 days, & Uttoxeter. Can't wait.

ADULT CHRISTMAS..........lasts a lifetime.

this is probably going to get me on the aftertimers thread but feck it here goes .............a good few years back i was struggling had no job and was basically potless on the Friday before the festival and was in for a gloomy time watching the festival with no bets fookin agony and nothing worse  . any way had a non runner on a slip from about a week previous which had £15 to come and was hoping to  save it for the festival ffs £15 for the whole of the festival ,anyway went over to my local billys to collect it as i needed to get some milk and bread    and as i was leaving the billys it came over the tannoy 33/1 Punjabi for the champion hurdle something went ping in my head and i put a £10 of the money on Punjabi and took the 33s went out bought the milk n,bread . on the Tuesday about an hour before the supreme theres a knock on my door and jerry the boch is standing there with a pack of beers and a racing post he,s come to watch the racing on the telly , fair enough a few beers and off we go ! no bets for me and in no time the champion hurdle is on us , now jerry is not named the "boch " for nothing this fella could stop the tide coming in if you have backed anything and he knows about it he will get it beat ,if you have the misfortune to have backed the same as him throw your ticket away it has no fecking chance ! if he had backed arkle every time it would have ended its career a fooking maiden ! anyway as they are lining up for the champion hurdle he says to me who have you backed i tried to ignore him but he was insistent so i said i haven't backed anything in the race , he says i have backed one in here and i am thinking please don't let it be Punjabi ,who you backed i says to him .........not telling ya ,you wont tell me who you backed says the boch like 2 fookin kids anyway they are off everything going o.k no hiccups and Punjabi travelling well also the fav binocular also going well coming to the last and Punjabi bino and fooking celestial halo all jump the last virtually together and the boch is screaming go on my son   and jumping up and down using the rolled up  racing post as a whip and is riding a finish whipping the bollax out of his own  arse   with the paper iam fit to burst and want to scream go on barry (geraghty was on board ) but know that would be suicide as the boch will get it  beat! but have to sit on my fookin hands and keep quiet and bite my lip , fookin agony as they reach the line its neck and neck 3 horses  and the boch screams go on  celestial ,relief for me qas he hasn't backed Punjabi  and only as they pass the winning line can i celebrate  the Punjabi win ! from being virtual potless and a passenger i am now a player with £340 in my pocket and with that bit of dough i had one of my best festivals ever won bundles ..........happy days ! but have made sure every year since that i have plenty of cash and ante post bets as i would not want to be in that situation again !

I only started to watch horse racing in 1998 when I was at home recovering from major surgery.

I was bored so put Cheltenham on for something to watch. I had never watched it before.

I've been a horse lover all my life but had only ever been interested in showjumping and eventing and had never watched any racing.

I don't know what it was that grabbed me but I have been hooked ever since. I fell in love with Blowing Wind. He did the Imperial Cup/Cheltenham double that year and won £50,000!

I had never even heard of Martin Pipe or AP MCCoy until then. They instantly became my favourite trainer and jockey.

I thought the whole thing was simply thrilling!  I think the anaesthetic must have done something to me

Anyway, every year when I watch the Cheltenham Festival, apart from it being the best week of the year, it reminds me how lucky I am to be alive.

That probably sounds bonkers, but I don't care.

Good stuff Joist, hope you and your mum have a few winners.

March 10th!

The Friday night beforehand is the best, when you leave work and know that the next week is going to be about nothing but racing. It really is the best feeling in the world. And Cheltenham in mid-March is the best place in the world.

**** reads  F  A  G  S

Dread the feeling on Friday night of The Festival.

the best thread ever, here we go again, full of optimism, life changing multiples, what can possibly go wrong ??

kid at christmas perfectly sums up my festival

from driving down on monday morning to the journey home on saturday, i love every minute of the week.

A couple of years ago someone started a thread on here saying he had startes a thread on Mumsnet, or something similar saying he cancelled going to his wife's scan cos Cheltenham was on. Caused much distress on Mumsnet but much hilarity on here.

Would love to see that one again

Cheltenham

noun
noun: Cheltenham, plural nouns: sacrifices, worships, pleasures

Supporting noun hedonism

- the Eucharist regarded as a propitiatory offering of the body and blood of thyself or as an act of thanksgiving
- a bid made in the belief that it will be less costly to be defeated in the betting ring than to allow the opponents to make a bet
- the acts or rites that make up a formal expression of reverence for a deity; a religious ceremony or ceremonies
- adoration or devotion comparable to religious homage, shown toward a place or principle
- the ethical theory that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life
- the pursuit of pleasure; sensual self-indulgence
- enjoyment and entertainment, contrasted with things done out of necessity

I rest my case, may we all sacrifice our war-chest whilst worshipping a place that by far surpasses Valhalla in a hedonistic and pleasurable way