But last week’s announcement also drew down the curtain on the British Champions Series (BCS), the 35 Group One and Group Two races at nine different courses earlier in the season which had been arranged into five categories – Sprint, Mile, Middle Distance, Long Distance and Fillies & Mares – with each supposedly offering a “narrative” path towards a race on the Champions Day card.
The imminence of Cheltenham and then the Grand National tends to scrub any consideration of Flat racing from most punters’ minds once February rolls around, but it is already less than 10 weeks until the 2,000 Guineas, the first Classic of the new season on turf, and there was some significant news around Britain’s richest day at the races last week with the announcement of a major upgrade to Champions Day at Ascot in October.
Ireland had already bagged a prime slot in early to mid-September for its Champions Weekend, while the late-September date for the precursor to Champions Day – the Festival of British Racing, where Frankie Dettori famously went through the card in 1996 – was much too close to Arc weekend in Paris.
The need for an up-to-date narrative to keep people engaged, in fact, felt like a guiding principle of the BCS and Champions Day project when it was launched in 2011, yet the Series has now been consigned to history with all the focus instead shifting to one afternoon at Ascot in mid-October.
Even if decent ground could be somehow guaranteed, Champions Day is still going to be stuck between Arc weekend in Paris a fortnight earlier and the Breeders’ Cup in the US two or three weeks later.
