he strangest, quietest and most surreal of Cheltenham Festivals, a meeting in front of empty stands that was beyond anyone’s imagination not much more than a year ago, will open on Tuesday with a stronger sense than ever that it is at the centre of the public gaze. It is a little over two weeks since a grotesque image emerged which showed the leading trainer Gordon Elliott sitting – and posing – on a horse that had died on his gallops. As a result, National Hunt racing begins its biggest week with its standing diminished, because of a photograph that left most of us within the racing bubble as shocked and repulsed as those on the outside looking in. “Devastating, just devastating,” is the heartfelt verdict of Barry Cooper, an equine vet who is also the independent chair of the sport’s horse welfare board. Tracey Crouch MP, a former minister for sport, is also an independent member of the board, alongside representatives of owners, trainers and racecourses. Cooper knows this should have been the Festival, and the year, when the first positive benefits of an ambitious programme devised by the HWB to improve the safety and welfare of horses at every stage of their lives should have started to become apparent. The result of an HWB report entitled A Life Well Lived, which was published in February 2020, the strategy is ambitious – and it needs to be. “It runs from the birth of a foal through to the end of its life,” he says. “It’s not just about the racing, the small bit in the middle that’s governed by the regulator. Obviously, safety is important, we want to reduce the number of fallers and deaths on racecourses, but we also want to improve the aftercare. That’s a measure of how you look after the horse, how you look after the retired ones.” The rate of fatal injuries in jump racing has been declining for 20 years but Cooper is determined to maintain the downward pressure, aided at least in part by a sophisticated, predictive model to analyse data on fallers and injuries which was initiated after six horses died during the Festival in 2018. “It’s a massive undertaking and a huge data-gathering exercise,” he says. “But that’s what we need. Previously people said: ‘In my opinion, this, that or the other happens.’ Now there’s actual data and statistical analysis of what happens and therefore people can make informed decisions as a result of it. “Injury rates are coming down but they are still too high and we want to drive them down even further. There will always be risk but there are avoidable risks we want to get rid of. “The only time people see a horse now is when it’s performing in a sport, and unless jump racing sorts everything out it will not be there [in the future]. We have to get casualties down and we have to get the public onside, as all horse sports need to. They are all under the spotlight and we have to take the public with us in order to maintain that social licence.” If ever there was a time when the sport needed a Festival with nothing but a series of positives, a race or even a whole meeting that might begin to edge the Elliott image out of the public consciousness, then that surely is now. Elliott himself, of course, will be absent, having had his licence suspended for six months by the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Authority earlier this month. But around three-dozen of his horses will be at Cheltenham, under the new – and, according to the IHRB, pretty much exclusive – supervision of Denise Foster, a near-neighbour in County Meath. Foster, who would have been a great answer if you were asked to come up with the name a National Hunt trainer on Pointless just three weeks ago, now starts the Festival as a 14-1 shot to finish the four days as the leading trainer. Since several of Elliott’s stable stars – including the unbeaten Envoi Allen, odds-on for Thursday’s Marsh Novice Chase – moved to other stables after the photograph of the trainer appeared, it remains an unlikely outcome. But it will also be a surprise if Foster fails to reach the winner’s enclosure this week – a moment when the PR nightmare for the sport which unfolded over the last fortnight will be revisited. But there are much more positive possibilities too, that could catch the imagination during the first, and most significant, of those rare moments each year when the wider public pays attention to racing. It could, for instance, be a week when a lot more people wake up to a fact that insiders have taken for granted for some time now: female jockeys not only compete against male riders on equal terms, they beat them on a regular basis too. But not, as yet, in one of the week’s “big four” feature events, something that could change on Tuesday afternoon when Honeysuckle, with Rachael Blackmore in the saddle, is expected to set off as favourite to win the Champion Hurdle. Blackmore also has an obvious chance to become the first female jockey to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup when she partners A Plus Tard in Friday’s showpiece, while Bryony Frost is no forlorn hope either aboard her King George winner, Frodon. To win, they will need to dethrone Al Boum Photo, the Gold Cup winner for the last two years, and a horse that – unlike Best Mate nearly 20 years ago – has yet to really capture the hearts of racing fans. Perhaps the all-but unstoppable tide of winners from the Willie Mullins stable – he is 1-5 to finish the week as the leading trainer once again – has left some feeling a little jaded, but he would be only the fifth horse ever to win the Gold Cup three times. The great pity, of course, is that if or when history is made this week, there will be no spectators there to see it. No photographs of the winning horse and rider walking back in front of the packed stands and up the chute into the cauldron of the winner’s enclosure. No acclaim, no jubilation from the crowd, no roar to send them on their way to the first. That, we hope, will all be back next year. This time around, amid the sound of silence where 60,000 or more people should be, we can only hope that a Festival which starts out several lengths down thanks to the actions of one of its most successful trainers will claw back the deficit over the best four racing days of the year, and finish the week with its nose in front.