There must be every chance seeing how bad the weather has been recently, but if we do get a few dryer days at the end of February/start of March the ground can really dry up. I believe that happened last year, the week before the festival the ground was soft but dried up a lot over those seven days with the slightly warmer weather.
It’s getting unlikely Phil to be honest, albeit that Cheltenham dries pretty rapidly. The water table is so high at the moment that any extra rain has nowhere to go. It would take a good few weeks of dry weather to calm that situation down. But one never knows.
In the words of that great linguist GW Bush, I think you may be
‘misremembering’
last year. Jan-March were bone dry and the course was watering fully three weeks before the meeting.
One of the more incredible things about 2012 as the second-wettest year ever is that the first three months were setting records for
lack
of rainfall. It’s quite amusing to google ‘drought’ and see all the dire warnings from early April!
Mike