After every race at Cheltenham, there is a point along the railed horse walk where the winners and losers go their separate ways. The first four veer left into the winners’ enclosure, where thousands will be massed on the viewing steps. The also-rans, however, must take a right into the unsaddling enclosure for unplaced horses, where nobody is watching, and where the long faces are equine and human.
In there, shattered dreams are littered on the grass. Sport is full of dreams that can never come true, but even in the age of sports science and sports psychology and emotional regulation and data-saturated explanations for everything that happens in the arena, dreaming is still the most potent force of all. Before there is a plan, there must be a dream.
Horse racing trades heavily on that dynamic. For anybody with a passion for jumps racing and the opportunity to own even a share in a horse, Cheltenham is the ultimate place of fantasy.
Cheltenham fairytales, though, were never as common as the mythology made out. Moneyed people have always owned most of the best horses.
READ MORE
But just as the gap between the top and bottom in the Premier League is greater now than it was in the old First Division, that is true of Cheltenham too. One of the unintended consequences of the festival’s success since the turn of the century has been the emergence of a premier league of ownership.
There was a snapshot of these changed circumstances in the winners’ enclosure a year ago when Poniros won the Triumph Hurdle for Willie Mullins at odds of 100/1. Bought off the flat for nearly a quarter of a million euro, Poniros runs in the colours of Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton football club. According to the last Sunday Times Rich List, Bloom’s personal wealth is estimated at £721 million.
It was Bloom’s fourth time to win a grade-one race at the festival but, for whatever reason, he wasn’t there to witness Poniros’s victory. Maybe he believed the odds and had more pressing business elsewhere. In the normal course of events a 100/1 winner would be a heartwarming underdog story, but Cheltenham can’t even guarantee that now.
Contrast that to Norton’s Coin, the last 100/1 winner at the festival. When he won the 1990 Gold Cup, it was the greatest shock in the history of the festival’s most prestigious race. Sirrell Griffiths, the trainer and owner, was a dairy farmer from west Wales, who trained two horses as a hobby. On the morning of the Gold Cup, he milked his cows as usual before he drove the horsebox 127 miles from Nantgaredig to the racecourse.
The only reason Norton’s Coin lined up in the Gold Cup was because Griffiths had missed the entry deadline for the handicap chase he had in mind. “I had to pay £1,000 to enter in the Gold Cup,” said Griffiths years later, “so I had to finish in the first six to cover my costs.”
The odds of that happening at the time were really about a million to one. But the odds of it happening now must be a billion to one.
There was a time when Cheltenham glory was distributed more widely, or at least when it felt like the odds were not so stacked against the everyman dreamers. During the Celtic Tiger years there was a surge in syndicate ownership in Ireland and for a while that was reflected at the Cheltenham Festival. When Total Enjoyment won the Cheltenham Bumper in 2004, for example, it was the kind of fantasy outcome that seemed attainable.
Total Enjoyment was trained outside Tralee by Tom Cooper and owned by 10 Kerry people and one from Tyrone. The horse had cost them no more than €20,000, which made it a luxury item, of course, but it wasn’t a yacht in Monte Carlo. They had happened upon a good horse and rode a magic carpet to the Cotswolds.
As luck would have it, the Cheltenham winners’ enclosure that day was populated by some of the most famous silks in racing. The horse who came second was owned by John Magnier and the horse who finished third belonged to Michael Tabor. For them, a runner at Cheltenham was just a bit of fun. Owning and breeding an endless stream of blue bloods on the flat is where they have made a fortune. In that game, Goliath has an unassailable advantage.
At the elite level, though, jumps racing has become more like the flat and that is why Cheltenham has changed so fundamentally. It is now a playground for multimillionaires. Their passion for the game is not in question, but their dominance of the bloodstock market has queered the pitch.
While big players with bottomless pockets compete for Cheltenham prospects at the sales or in France, syndicates and small enthusiasts from the other end of the ownership spectrum have been driven further and further away from the Cheltenham winners’ enclosure.
[ Malachy Clerkin: Seven Cheltenham storylines that have nothing to do with bettingOpens in new window ]
Of the 28 horses who won at the festival last year, 17 were owned by a handful of the most resourceful owners; they also mopped up all of the most valuable and prestigious races. At that level, it is a closed shop.
More than ever, Cheltenham dreams are up for sale now. JP McManus is always in the market. He breeds horses too, and buys young, unproven stock, but it is not unusual for him to pick up a Cheltenham prospect in midseason.
Two years ago, he bought A Dream To Share before he won the Cheltenham Bumper; last year he paid huge money for The New Lion before he won the Turners Novices’ Hurdle. In recent months he acquired Oscars Brother, a very promising young chaser who will run at the festival this week.
Money talks in every language. Declan Queally has three horses going to the festival this seek, a staggering achievement for a small yard. But in recent weeks one of them was bought by Victorious Racing, a large operation headed up by a member of the Bahraini royal family. Who knew that they had a Cheltenham dream?
Of all the romanticised places in sport, few are as brutal as Cheltenham. A couple of thousand dreams only have a few days left to live.
Maybe that’s why we can’t look away.
