Under Starter's Orders

This blog begins its life just as the mud continues to settle after the four days of the Cheltenham Festival 2013 and just ahead of the start of the new Flat racing season which begins at Doncaster on Friday 22 March. With the weather the UK has been experiencing this Spring, some of the two-year-olds running in the William Hill ‘Download The App’ Brocklesby Conditions Stakes on Friday afternoon could get a snowy shock for their first appearance on the racecourse.

The Cheltenham Festival 2013 was, as always, an absorbing week’s racing but not a ‘classic’. There were undoubtedly some good performances by some talented horses – Sprinter Sacre (Sportingbet Queen Mother Champion Chase), Our Conor (JCB Triumph Hurdle), Bobs Worth (Betfred Cheltenham Gold Cup Chase) – but it lacked some of the rivalry of previous years that make for great Cheltenham Festivals. Perhaps this year’s Festival can been viewed as a year of transition as a new crop of horses come to the fore.

The aim of this blog is to discuss the current events in UK horseracing, to preview the big meetings on both the Flat and Jumps (the Guineas meeting, Royal Ascot, QIPCO Champions Day, the Grand National meeting, Cheltenham Festival etc.), to explain some of the terminology surrounding betting and horseracing, and generally to peer inside the esoteric and fascinating world of the ‘Turf’.