Cricket teams have 11 players each, but there were far more British horses running than Irish
THERE HAD been much talk in Cheltenham all week about a certain recent cricket match. But in the end, this was probably a bigger achievement. For a century, Ireland has measured success at Britain’s greatest racing festival in terms of taking a few of the prizes home each year. Five wins was good. Ten was the record. The rivalry was never meant to be a head-to-head competition.
After all, whereas cricket teams have 11 players each, there are far more British horses running here than Irish. Yet by the time the Willie Mullins-trained Sir des Champs won the penultimate race yesterday, the score for the week was 13-13.
The festival’s closing event, the Grand Annual Steeple Chase, thus became a tie-breaker. And had not the cunning home team arranged to have 22 of the 23 horses taking part in it, Ireland might even have secured overall supremacy.
But it was a record-breaking week even so: far and away the most successful Irish Cheltenham ever. Allowing that the event expanded to four days in 2005, the total of 13 wins still dwarfs the achievements of former years. By way of historic perspective, that’s more than the accumulated total for the seven years between 1986 and 1992.
Oddly enough, the biggest race of the 2011 festival – the Gold Cup – was an almost Ireland-free zone. It was won by the favourite, Long Run: an extremely unusual animal here in that he was neither bred, owned, nor trained by anyone Irish. Even more rarely, it had an English jockey, and an amateur one at that: Sam Waley-Cohen (a man far too posh to turn professional).
Among the full-time jockeys who could only chase him home yesterday was Ruby Walsh on Kauto Star. But Walsh had an otherwise triumphant week, winning the jockey’s championship yet again. And it had earlier fallen to him, aptly, to ride the record-breaking 11th Irish winner, when another Mullins-trained horse – Final Approach – edged out Tony McCoy’s Get Me out of Here in a photo-finish.
The famously hard-driving McCoy doesn’t lose many close ones and, crossing the line, Walsh didn’t know whether his horse had won. “It all depends on where their noses are,” he said. “Luckily his nose is bigger than mine.” Sure enough the photo revealed that Final Approach had won by his nostrils, and thus the Irish challenge nudged into the record books.
Whether they’d backed him or not, “Get Me Out of Here” probably summed up the feelings of many after this four-day marathon.
But spare a thought for the Corkman who stood to win €1 million from Boylesports if the last leg of an accumulator had stood up in yesterday’s opener. First Lieutenant, Boston’s Angel, Albertas Run, and Sizing Europe had all obliged him earlier in the week.
It only remained for a horse called Sam Winner to live up to his name, and with the same Ruby in the saddle, his chances could not have been better.
Then fate cruelly arranged that Sam Winner would only finish fourth. It was an each-way accumulator, however, so all was not lost. Just most of it, as the calculations proved. Instead of a million, the Corkman won about €4,000.
That was a rare triumph for the bookies yesterday. Another string of winning favourites, including Long Run, swung this festival definitively to the punters. One bookie estimated that, industry-wide, the losses ran into millions.
But the name of the latest Gold Cup winner is telling. When it doesn’t have four legs and a jockey on its back, the Long Run is every bookmaker’s friend.
Off the racecourse, meanwhile, Gold Cup day brought a flurry of late entries for the Cheltenham Celebrity Stakes, which had been one of the poorer fields all week.
Lily Allen made the early running when she sashayed across the parade ring early in the afternoon with a copy of the Racing Post tucked under her arm, stopping only to discuss her betting budget.
She had “forty quid to play with in each race and maybe 100 for the Gold Cup”, she said, but she hadn’t made her mind up what to back. And with that she was gone.
Princess Anne hung around a bit longer: she had to present the cup, after all. Alex Ferguson was there too, to see his horse What a Friend finish fourth in the big race.
But all told, it was the professional celebrity Jordan who won by a neck, and in more ways than one. Wearing a new man, she appeared to be suffering from a rare attack of media shyness. “I’m not interested in being photographed,” she protested to the flocking cameramen. At which shock news, one of the snappers responded: “So why do you keep tweeting about where you’re going?”
Also appearing at the track, however belatedly, was the lesser-spotted Fine Gael TD. We had waited all week for one to appear. Then, like a Dublin bus, there were two: Lucinda Creighton and John Paul Phelan.
“How do you guys always find me?” asked the former, sounding a bit like Jordan, before she gamely posed for the paparazzi anyway.
There have also been reported sightings here of the new Ceann Comhairle, Seán Barrett: a hardened racing enthusiast.
But it was still a long way from the Cheltenhams of the recent past, when the government could sometimes have held an emergency cabinet meeting in the parade ring.