What did the jockeys say about the Cheltenham ground after riding in the Supreme?

Jockeys riding in the first race of the Cheltenham Festival described the ground as soft, dead and tacky as Marine Nationale clocked a winning time ten seconds slower than the Racing Post standard in the Sky Bet Supreme Novices' Hurdle.

A lack of rain and freezing temperatures have been a common theme in the build-up to this year's meeting, with clerk of the course Jon Pullin admitting earlier this month that ground conditions were a "long way from where we'd like them to be", with fleeces laid on parts of the turf to aid grass growth.

However, the past week has finally seen rain arrive, with several bands of wet weather leaving conditions described as officially soft on day one of the meeting and riders in the Supreme generally agreed with that description.

Danny Mullins, Davy Russell and Harry Cobden all called the ground "soft" but Sam Twiston-Davies, JJ Slevin, Simon Torrens and Aidan Coleman all felt like it was "hard work".

"It's dead and there's not much life," said Twiston-Davies. Slevin added: "Dead ground and deceivingly hard work," while Coleman said: "It's quite tacky. It's drying out, which is nearly what you don't want. It's holding."

A winning time of 3m 59.69s was around ten seconds outside the Racing Post standard of 3m 49.00s and indicative of the official going description of soft.

The Racing Post's betting editor Keith Melrose said: "The time of the Supreme Novices' suggests that the ground at the start of the Cheltenham Festival is similar to other recent years when the ground has been described as soft. They went a sound pace, if not an end-to-end one, and recorded a time around ten seconds slower than standard.

"That time is much the same as Klassical Dream's in the race on soft in 2019. It is slightly slower than Appreciate It in 2021 (soft), but much faster than Shishkin's soft-ground time in 2020. There is more rain forecast for Cheltenham this week, so soft ground might prevail throughout this year's festival. But the inference from the Supreme is that, without further water on the track, it would be quick by the time we reach the end of the week. The ground is soft, no worse and would be comfortably good to soft with a dry 24 hours."

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