Essential 12-page guide to racing’s annual carnival

▶ Veteran trainer wants to help racing recover after one of the darkest episodes in its history

The invitation arrives to spend a morning at Seven Barrows, Nicky Henderson’s pastoral idyll and the equine equivalent of the Dorchester, for a timely reminder of what it means to respect an animal. For 16 days, racing has been battered by the scandal unleashed by a picture of Gordon Elliott sitting astride a dead horse, and nobody is more pained than the normally avuncular Henderson, given the shadow it has cast over his beloved Cheltenham Festival.

“A horrendous, catastrophic, unbelievably stupid error,” says Henderson, who turned 70 last December but whose passion to protect his sport is undimmed. “Gordon will regret it for the rest of his life.” It is an appalling image, with Elliott perched on the horse’s lifeless body in a pose not dissimilar to a trophy hunter’s, and Henderson, six times British jump racing’s champion trainer, is not about to offer any mitigation. “I couldn’t imagine anyone doing it, to be honest with you. It’s unthinkable. We’ve all done something in our lives that we have regretted, but this is ridiculous.” Racing’s ultimate challenge over the next four days is somehow to heal the scar tissue that Elliott’s crassness has created. That path will be far from smooth, given that Cheltenham will, for the first time, be staged as a ghost event, its empty grandstands serving as a bleak echo of its perceived recklessness in letting in 60,000 fans a day last March, in the same week that Boris Johnson warned many families would “lose loved ones before their time” from coronavirus.

The great carnival of the National Hunt calendar will unfold without the fabled Cheltenham roar, without the palpable English-irish antagonism, without the snaking queues for the Guinness tent. And yet, for Henderson, the emotions will seldom have been so acute, as he calls on the racing community to present a nobler face to the world in the wake of the Elliott ignominy.

“There’ll be lots of tears for lots of reasons,” he says. “There are antis out there who don’t approve of racing, and something like this is just what they want. But we have to show everybody that this is a fantastic sport, and that one isolated incident shouldn’t tarnish it. The only reason we do this is we love horses. With 99.9 per cent of the people in this game, the only thing we know is horses.”

Henderson is as persuasive