When the generals have lost heart and crept away from the battlefield it is hard for the ground troops to keep up their spirits. Although the Cheltenham Festival buzz is already in the air, BetBright Chase Day at Kempton Park last Saturday definitely had something deflated about it. Everybody was still doing their jobs but the atmosphere wasn’t one of celebration or expectation. The cover of the racecard for which punters had to fork out £3 carried, as it long has done, the words ‘Kempton Park — a Jockey Club racecourse’, but that doesn’t have the same ring about it now we know that the Jockey Club intends, as soon as it can secure a property developer’s signature on the cheque, to turn Kempton into a huge housing estate.
Although the BetBright-sponsored event was full of interesting races contested by the cream of Britain’s racing yards, the racecard compilers had taken their motto from the dying news editor who insisted his tombstone should bear only the words.
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