Cheltenham pilots our mortal superiors

Sideline Cut: Cheltenham must be as good as they say because regular jockeys are tougher than the rest. Gloriously mad in the head, of course, but unquestionably hard as nails.

Cheltenham is a strange and fascinating old pageant and is the only week on the sporting calendar when the sinewy little stable men in their jodhpurs and gay silks are given the opportunity to outshine the brooding stars of the Premiership and the other heroes of big-time ball sports.

Jockeys leave them all in the shade when it comes to honesty, bravery and general, all-round coolness. Jockeys are brave, feisty, cheerful and seemingly unbreakable little buggers who consist on a diet of peeled grapes, 20 smokes, water and the occasional Jaffa Cake. Although many top jockeys struggle past the five-foot-nothing barrier, they manage to make taller men look clumsy and poorly formed and somehow insignificant. Stories concerning the prodigious romantic talents of jockeys are legion, which is why so many popular fictive "romps" are set amidst the hay and stirrups.

Although Lord knows where these jockeys are supposed to find the time or the energy. Ruby Walsh was involved in so many races this week that I was giving serious though to phoning the Employment Complaints Commission. The poor man had no sooner won a race than he was back again at the starting post wearing different colours. It was exhausting just following his afternoon schedule. He didn't even have time for a cup of tea, let alone a celebratory roll in the hay.

The fascinating rivalry between the brilliant, affable Kildare jockey and the enigmatic figure of AP McCoy - a name that summons to mind a Confederate general from Dixieland rather than a modern-day horseman - gave the famous spring race meeting a drama to go along with the thrill and fun of the racing.

After a couple of days, with the popular favourites falling like drunks, it seemed as if the more sensible thing to do was to forget about backing the horse and merely put your money on a jockey named Walsh. In the build-up to Cheltenham last week, the general mood across Ireland was akin to "We'll Take Manhattan."

There could be no mistaking the fact that while the course lay in the heart of the Cotswolds, this racing festival was as Irish in flavour as a pint of plain. It was as if we were doing the English a favour by merely letting them show up.

Where two decades ago, RTÉ used to dispatch television crews to shoot tearful emigration reports at the airports of Dublin and Knock, they now shoot footage of grinning Paddies descending on Gloucester for a weekend of high rolling, big spending, carousing and generally living it up.

The essayist EB White once wrote, "nobody should come to New York to live unless they are willing to be lucky."

It appears the Irish flock to Cheltenham in the same spirit of wanton, carefree adventure. Racing commentators always seem so much more informed and knowledgeable than in other sports - probably because so few of us know anything about the horse game - and all week, the broadcasts were filled with preposterously large wagers on long-odds horses and outright mortgages on horses considered certainties, like Detroit City in the Champion Hurdle or Black Jack Ketchum in the World Hurdle on Thursday afternoon.

For a split second, you might have heard a pin drop at Cheltenham (even though the going was soft) when Ketchum tumbled at the second fence. The horse flung McCoy in one direction and then somersaulted back into an upright position. Thankfully, rider and mount were fine.

It wasn't anything like the most frightening fall of the week but it did illuminate the vulnerability of the jockey and the sheer weight and power of the horse when both lose control at high speed.

Early in the week, Timmy Murphy went backside overhead and for a terrifying few seconds lay prostrate and helpless as several tonnes of thoroughbred horses charged past him. It was a nerve-wracking sight. He walked away. They usually do. But that doesn't ever lessen the wonder at the sheer courage and, it might be said, human folly that governs jumps racing.

The jockeys may be trained to stay still and calm even as horses thunder all about them and trust in the skill of their colleagues and the agility of the animals to avoid them. But for those few seconds, they are in an incredibly dangerous place.

One of the conceits of national hunt racing is the perpetual surprise with which commentators and crowd alike greet a fall. A horse tumbling at a fence is treated as something between a surprise and a tragedy. The wonder is when you have up to 20 supremely athletic animals being guided around a narrow course filled with obstacles by exceptionally brave, competitive (and romantically insatiable) men that any of them make it around the track at all.

Horses, after all, don't know this is Cheltenham. Kauto Star cannot suspect that, in a fit of inspiration, some lad in Kiltimagh headed into the bank, withdrew the SSIA money and placed the whole shebang on a win. Horses just want a gallop and a feed. They are temperamental.

Previewing the week, amateur jockey Sam Waley-Cohen immortally captured the reliability of the mechanics of a horse when he likened it to "a teapot balanced on four champagne flutes".

As in life, anything can go wrong. And so it proved this week. So many of the absolute bankers talked up by the experts - Well Chief, Newmill, Monet's Garden, etc - simply failed to rise the occasion. Horses are not people and for all the grooming and coaxing and training, they have their own mysterious moods and vicissitudes. That is why punters, be they foolhardy novices or those rare gambler geniuses who study the game like it is a mathematical science, talk of having a "fancy" for a horse. At some level, everybody is driven by instinct and a degree of blind faith and a willingness to believe in EB White's interpretation of luck.

In one bookmaker's this week, a punter gradually became incandescent with joy as his fancy, the 16 to 1 Sublimity, came to prominence in the Champion Hurdle. What began as murmurs of encouragement and hope soon blossomed into pure theatre. The delighted punter slapped his newspaper against his palm as though it were a whip and crouched in sympathy with the jockey, yelling, "Go on, ya daisy" as Sublimity nosed ahead and charged for home.

Afterwards, other punters took time to lift their noses from the form guides, walk across to the hero and offer solemn handshakes, as though he were the actual owner in the paddock at Cheltenham.

And in a way, he was. Whether he had placed a month's wages or the price of his lunch on Sublimity was his own business. The important thing was he had made the right choice. After all the advice and guesswork, he had backed the winner. So for the duration of the race, he could invest the same emotion as the owner, Bill Hennessy. While the race was on, it was his horse and he felt as exhilarated as if he were on board with Philip Carberry. He felt on the top of the world, at least for a short time.

As the eternally frustrated Basil Fawlty put it all those years ago, thrusting a kiss at the heavens in the classic episode when his secret bet on Dragonfly came in, "For once I am winning."