Cheltenham Festival 2024: Famous faces join schoolchildren at race week community day
ITV West Country reporter Ken Goodwin joined the celebrations
Children from Gloucestershire have been at Prestbury Park ahead of Cheltenham Festival 2024, to meet some famous faces and learn all about the event.
The festival is one of the biggest events in the horse racing calendar, and this year it's celebrating one hundred years of the Gold Cup.
To mark the occasion, a community day was held on Monday 11 March.
Children from local schools were invited to a special centenary lunch by the jockey club, where they were greeted by racing legends, one of which Jonjo O'Neill. He told ITV West Country: "It’s a magical place, isn’t it really the place every sportsman wants to be. It's just magic is it’s a unique place in the world and it always will be for me."The children were also offered a tour of the course, and in the jockey's weighing in room, there stood another legend. Sir Anthony Peter McCoy OBE.
He said: "It’s just nice to see young kids coming in and asking all the questions and being interested, and I think that’s a good thing about sport you know from every walk of life and every sport from different cultures different different backgrounds so as possible for everybody."Fired up with enthusiasm the visiting children were given a go on practice horses.One of the children said: "Especially with your legs forward and your heels down, it’s quite hard to keep up but then I sort of got used to it.
Another added: "It felt fun, and it felt like I was actually in a real race. It was extremely tiring in what way what bits get tired, your hands and your legs."Helping them out is two times winner of the Cheltenham gold cup Richard Johnson.He said: "It’s brilliant to get children involved and again, let them have a bit of a taste of what racing about and hopefully get a few people interested in what we do all year round."