The Cheltenham Festival takes place annually in March at Cheltenham Racecourse in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. The meeting is often very popular with Irish visitors, mostly because of that nation’s, but also because it usually coincides with Saint Patrick’s Day, a national holiday in celebration of the patron saint of Ireland.
Huge amounts of money are bet during Cheltenham Festival week, with hundreds of millions of pounds being gambled over the four days.Cheltenham National Festival is often noted for its atmosphere, most notably the “Cheltenham roar”, which refers to the enormous amount of noise that the crowd generates as the horses enter the home straight for long run in to the winning post.
The first Cheltenham Festival Tickets was held in 1902 at Prestbury Park, Cheltenham National Festival , which still remains the same venue for the festival to this day. It was in 1904 that the first Cheltenham National Festival Steeplechase was introduced to the festival, a race which would become known as the Cheltenham National Festival Gold Cup in 1924, when it was won by a horse called Red Splash. The Gold Cup was the first of the festivals four Championship races, with the Champion Hurdle being introduced in 1927, the Queen Mother Champion Chase in 1959, and finally the Stayers Hurdle, which was first run in 1972.
In 2001 the Cheltenham Festival was cancelled due an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Britain. The meeting had initially been postponed to April, but when a case of foot and mouth was confirmed locally, putting the racecourse within an exclusion zone, all racing had to be called off.In 2008 the second day of the Cheltenham National Festival was cancelled due to heavy storms which hit Britain during the week. The races scheduled for that day were instead run on the Thursday and Friday of the Cheltenham National Festival.