We had two pieces of Cheltenham Festival news this week, one official and one unofficial.
I’ll cover both here, but there’s no doubt that the unofficial exclusive bagged by the Racing Post this week is the bigger talking point.
Mares Hurdle Switched from Tuesday to Thursday for 2026
First up, let’s sort the official news, which is a change between two races for the 2026 festival.
The Mares Hurdle, usually run after the Champion Hurdle on day one of the meeting, will switch to Thursday, with the Plate Handicap Chase making the opposite move, from Thursday to Tuesday.
It’s a bid to bulk up the Thursday, which also sees the Ryanair Chase and Stayers Hurdle switch order.
They currently co-headline the third day of action, and now the Ryanair will be the last run of those, going off at 4 pm, while the Stayers Hurdle will start at 3:20 pm. The Mares Hurdle slots in before them, off at 2:40 pm.
While I’m in favour of trying to improve the Thursday, you can’t help but feel like Tuesday has been hit hard here. After the Champion Hurdle, we’ve got a tough-to-solve handicap, followed by a novice handicap. I think plenty will spend that time in the bar.
Is a Wednesday-Saturday Cheltenham Festival on the Horizon?
Onto the far more interesting part of this week’s news, and the Racing Post revealed exclusively that they’d seen plans around the possibility of moving the Cheltenham Festival to a Wednesday-Saturday slot, giving them the final day of the meeting on a weekend.
It would be huge, the biggest change since we went from three to four days, but would it work?
There are a lot of positives and negatives to consider, and many have been spoken about as the news has emerged. Of course, as is the case with many sporting events, TV dictates things a lot of the time, and ITV have already said that they would be against this. It’s already been mentioned that Saturday would have to be broadcast on ITV4, rather than the main channel, due to Rugby coverage of the Six Nations.
We’ve already seen Cheltenham cut the price of a pint, cap attendances for the meeting and freeze ticket prices, amongst other things. They’re all small, this change, would be radical.
Guy Lavender, the new Chief Executive of Cheltenham Racecourse this year, has confirmed the idea is just a concept for now, but it has been spoken about. He said:
“We have just announced a series of changes for 2026, and we haven’t, at the moment, agreed on anything else for future years. We’re at the start point of considering a range of options, and I don’t think this is anything more than a concept at this particular stage. There are obvious pros and cons, but I think it is definitely worthy of consideration and exploring further.”
Cheltenham Wants to Change
I think what we should all take from this latest news is that Cheltenham is actively looking to change and do so in a big way.
Go back three years, and there was a consultation around moving the Cheltenham Festival to a five-day event. That ended, and was scrapped, much to the delight of many.
This plan for a Wednesday-Saturday festival could end up in the same way. But even if it does, we should all still take note. The people running the show want change, and they want something big to happen.
It shows the kind of decline that the meeting is seeing and also reaffirms the importance of the festival in the sport’s calendar. It needs to be a success for the sport to be a success.
“We’ve got to get people in earlier and becoming fans of our sport”
Josh Apiafi is in favour of an alteration to the days of the Cheltenham Festival… pic.twitter.com/JSiWqAYNd9
— At The Races (@AtTheRaces) October 20, 2025
I’m a traditionalist, so I don’t want that. I also believe Cheltenham succeeds by being the biggest sporting event of the day, for all four days of the meeting. Putting a Saturday in would risk that and put that day potentially behind other things.
While the argument is that there would be more people available to attend on a Saturday, I actually believe we should be looking in the other direction.
Keep it midweek, but make it bigger and better, so that people actively want to book time off work and attend, just like the good old days.
But if I’m being honest, this is an idea I could definitely see happening. As I’ve said, Cheltenham want something big. They can’t go to five days, can’t afford to drop back down to three days, so what else is left?
The only thing I can see is moving to include a weekend, and whether I like it or not, I do think it’s an idea that has plenty of legs in it, and one that I could see happening in the next two or three years.