ST PATRICK’S Day came 24 hours early at Cheltenham this year, when March 16th saw Irish horses and their connections turn the trip from the racetrack to the winners’ enclosure into a day-long parade, with Michael O’Leary as honorary grand marshal.
In a statistic unprecedented in the festival’s history, trainers from Ireland won the afternoon’s first six races, taking the total for the week so far to nine. To underline their supremacy, they also claimed a 1-2-3-4 in the feature event, the Queen Mother Champion Chase.
The run only ended with the day’s final race; although in fairness, England had also won a clean sweep of the best-dressed lady competition, the only event of the day in which the Irish finished nowhere.
Among the more emotional winning owners, uncharacteristically, was Michael O’Leary. Moments after cheering the Mouse Morris-trained First Lieutenant to victory, he spoke in a hoarse and cracking voice about his father, Ted, who is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. “He’s watching this at home and I hope he enjoyed it as much as me,” he said. “We may not have him for many more Cheltenhams, so it’s an emotional day.”
O’Leary jnr credited his father with giving him the “disease” of a love for racing, although he also joked that his father thought him an “idiot” for the amount of money he invested in the sport. The investment didn’t look so bad yesterday, he admitted.
“All the money you waste on horses is worth it for a moment like this.” The Ryanair boss was not expecting a second such moment yesterday. “[Trainer] Willie Mullins gets doubles and trebles – the rest of us are happy if we can win one,” he said. But two hours later, he was back in the winner’s enclosure, thanks to Carlito Brigante. “This is getting easy,” he quipped as a string of well-wishers shook his hand.
O’Leary’s only regret was that the run of Irish sporting success might end with the festival: “If you could send your rugby team over to Dublin at the weekend to lose, it would be very welcome,” he told an English journalist. “But I suspect Irish hospitality will be extended to the English, as usual.”
Irish trainers, owners, jockeys and horses apart, the other big group of winners on day two of the festival were the bookies. After a string of big losses on Tuesday, their run of bad luck extended to yesterday’s opener when – taking their cue from the fog that surrounded the course, punters opted for a grey horse: Chicago Grey, to be exact. He won, but he was to be the day’s only successful favourite.
After that, the litany of Irish successes was like the cavalry riding to the bookies’ rescue over the Cheltenham hill. The initial success had been deceptive.
As often happens, it was the unfancied Irish horses who triumphed. And by the end of the day, the bookies had made most of their losses from Tuesday back.
The difficulty of picking winners was well illustrated by the fate of Tuesday’s hero, Ruby Walsh. Walsh rides for both Ireland’s Willie Mullins and England’s Paul Nicholls and has the pick of those two formidable stables.
As luck would have it, the Nicholls horse in the second race was even named after him: Rock On Ruby. But there’s no room for sentiment when jockeys are making decisions, so in the event Walsh chose to be on the Mullins horse, So Young.
Partly as a result of that choice, So Young started favourite. He could only finish third, however, and among the horses Walsh had to watch the back of at the end was the one named in his honour, which finished second.
In the next race, just to emphasise the vagaries of the sport, he took a crashing fall. And after the triumph of Ruby Tuesday, when he had three wins, this was more woeful Wednesday, with none.
Going from hero to zero and back again, often in the space of an hour, is the jockey’s lot. Robbie Power was another to take a late-race tumble yesterday, all the more painful because his horse, Oscars Well, looked to be on the way to victory at the time. But 35 minutes later, he was making a delayed entry to the winner’s enclosure with another Jessica Harrington-trained horse, Boston’s Angel.
“I was absolutely gutted after the last race,” he said. “But Jessie told me to get over it. It was done and dusted, she said, and this lad would win. So I had went and had a glass of Coke and a fag, and now I’m here.”
The crowd gathered around the prize-giving end of the parade ring was slightly more subdued than usual for an Irish success: possibly reflecting the fact that, at 16/1, Boston’s Angel had few shareholders among them. But Power’s enthusiasm was infectious and, as he pumped his arms at the gallery, the punters cheered him anyway.
Some of the loudest cheers yesterday may have been heard in a normally subdued part of Galway: the area around the fields of Athenry. The day’s only well-backed Irish winner, Chicago Grey, was owned by a man named John Earls, who owns a “small farm” near the town (Athenry, that is, not Chicago): perhaps even the famous fields themselves. It was the biggest win of his horse-racing career, but he had also spread his good fortune around.
After buying the horse for €11,000 as a foal, he sold shares in it to a few friends. And having had a “substantial” bet in the run-up to Cheltenham, he had also shared his confidence with locals. “Athenry and a lot of Galway would have this horse backed,” he assured us when asked. So it seems fair to assume that last night, at least for a few hours, those low-lying fields were a bit less lonesome than usual.