In the first race of this year’s Galway Festival, the hopes of punters rested ominously on a horse called Davy Crockett.
If you were of a superstitious bent, as most racegoers are, it was not encouraging to reflect that the original, two-legged Davy Crockett is mainly famous for a doomed last stand at the Siege of the Alamo, where he and everyone else died.
On the other hand, that Davy was not trained by Willie Mullins, ridden by Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Mark Walsh or owned by JP McManus. If he had been any of the foregoing, he would probably have been well out of Texas and by the time the trouble started.
Also encouraging to supporters of the four-legged version, meanwhile, was that his main rival was a horse named Mick Collins. That was hardly designed to reassure the nervous either.
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So the Mullins horse was backed into odds-on favouritism for the novice hurdle, and, as so often with Mullins-trained mounts, the weight of money proved well justified.
Mick Collins briefly laid siege to Davy Crockett around the last bend after the latter made a mistake. But the favourite pulled clear up the straight and, roared to the finish line by a big opening-night crowd, got the festival off to a heart-warmingly bad start for the bookmakers.
It was a different story in the second race, where another Mullins runner, Rakki, started favourite, albeit in a much more competitive field of 20.
Among his backers, at a tenner each way, were two Slovakian sisters, Rebeka and Radka Kotulakova, who admitted they only picked the horse because he sounded like he was related to them.
The Kotulakovas are third-year business information students at Galway’s Atlantic Technological University, now doing internships locally with Boston Scientific.
Identical twins, they differed only when asked their age. “Twenty three,” Rebeka said. “Twenty four,” Radka suggested. Under further questioning, it emerged that like most twins they had in fact been born in the same year, but in August, so that, as they ultimately agreed in a joint statement, they are about to turn 24.
The identical looks explained their outfits, among the most elegant on the racecourse amid stiff competition, although ladies day is not until Thursday. They wore also-identical Edwardian-style boating hats and dresses, except that Rebekah’s ensemble was black with white ribbons while Radka’s was white with black.
If they’d come later in the week (which they can’t), The Irish Times suggested, they might have made history as the first joint winners of the best dressed lady competition. Alas, it was their debut visit to the festival and nobody had told them about lady’s day in time.
Also unfortunately, Rakki’s co-ordination did not quite match theirs. He could finish only a distant third, while a 10-1 shot named Jerrari won well, to quieter cheers than those for Davy Crockett.
There was more pain for the bookies in the third, but Aidan O’Brien’s Constitutional River went to the starting at intimidatingly thin odds that meant you had to risk €5 on him to win one.
Then came the event bookmakers really dread: a horse that, wearing the green-and-gold of JP McManus, starts at long odds which then shrink under an avalanche of bets. Filey Bay was backed in from 16-1 to 7-1 while the bookies trembled. And even more than usually afterwards, McManus’s shy smile looked like that of the cat that got the cream.
There was some poignancy in the result, too, however. The winning jockey was Alan O’Sullivan, a younger brother of the late Michael, who died days short of his 25th birthday last February after a fall in a race at Thurles.
