• Outsider Kingofthefrontier wins Sharp Novices’ Hurdle

• Trainer John Dawson gets better of Dan Skelton

The jumping game increasingly resembles the Flat when it comes to the concentration of racing power in ever fewer trainers’ hands, but the opening day of Cheltenham’s new season – the first, in fact, since Gold Cup day in March – brought a reminder that romance has not been drained entirely from the winter code.

Dan Skelton, who dethroned Willie Mullins to become the new champion over jumps last season, had already trained 115 winners in the current campaign before racing on Friday, nearly halfway towards Martin Pipe’s all-time record of 243. John Dawson, by contrast, had sent out a total of six winners from his yard in North Yorkshire since May 2023.

Next racing at the famous venue will be in October after work is done around a hole that appeared in January

If you were planning a day at Cheltenham before the end of the jumps campaign, think again. The home of National Hunt racing said on Monday it will not stage another fixture until autumn, having taken the unprecedented decision to cancel its three remaining meetings in order to start major drainage works on the home straight over the summer months.

The two-day meeting scheduled for 15-16 April and the track’s traditional season finale, a hunter-chase fixture and concert on 1 May, attracted a combined total of nearly 25k spectators in 2025. That is a long way short of the 56k daily average at the festival this month, but will still represent a significant loss in ticket sales and race-day revenue from food, drinks and betting.

Insiders worry about how to grow racing as costs rise but JP McManus continues to find winners in his 50th year in the sport

No sooner had Lossiemouth lifted the roof off Cheltenham with a staggeringly dominant Champion Hurdle victory than the skies around Prestbury Park also began to brighten too. The buildup to the festival had been dominated by talk of civil war, of feuding and internecine conflict. But this was a reminder of the sport’s simple pleasures. Horse and jockey. Fence and turf. Drama and thrills for the ages.

This was a day that jump racing needed. The opening day attendance of 57,242 was the highest for three years. It made Cheltenham feel like a place to be while not bursting at the seams, a balancing act it has not always managed. Most important of all, the racing was competitive and the stars came out to play.

Nine years in, the appeal of lots of Grade One races, cheaper tickets and accommodation make Dublin the place to go

Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, had two reasons to be cheerful after the Irish Champion Hurdle at the Dublin Racing Festival (DRF) at Leopardstown on Sunday. His seven-year-old mare, Brighterdaysahead, had just won the feature race and she was cheered back to the winner’s enclosure by a sellout crowd that included several thousand visiting racegoers from Britain.

“The Dublin Racing Festival has been a great success and certainly it’s the first time you’ve seen a lot of English people coming over for the racing,” O’Leary said. “It’s a great festival in its own right and they’re all very welcome. I hope they flew Ryanair.”

Since his airline has nearly two-thirds of the market for flights between the UK and Ireland it was more of a certainty than a hope. For decades, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, in Paris in early October, was British racegoers’ big weekend abroad and reckoned to be the second-biggest annual exodus of British fans for a sporting event, with only the Le Mans 24-hour race drawing more. Less than a decade into its existence, the DRF is coming up fast on the Arc’s inside.