Racing

Cheltenham: Irish re-establish dominance on final day as Willie Mullins adds Gold Cup to his haul

Retired football managers turned horse owners Alex Ferguson and Harry Redknapp run out of luck after extraordinary winning streak on Thursday

Jockey Paul Townend celebrates on Galopin Des Champs after winning the Gold Cup Chase on day four of the 2024 Cheltenham Festival. Photograph: David Davies for The Jockey Club/PA Wire

Frank McNally
Fri Mar 15 2024 - 19:28

The Ides of March are ominous for some, it is well known. But the rides of March can be notoriously fickle too, at least around Cheltenham.

And after their extraordinary winning streak on Thursday, retired British football managers turned horse owners ran badly out of luck on the last day of the festival, when Irish trainers reasserted their dominance from earlier in the week.

In the process, Willie Mullins – winless the previous day – added several more prizes to the career century of Cheltenham victories he completed on Wednesday. His haul for this year again included the big one, the Gold Cup, in which reigning champion Galopin Des Champs retained his title in style.

Mullins was also instrumental in ensuring that Sir Alex Ferguson’s fates, friendly on March 14th, took a turn for the worse a day later.

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After back-to-back successes on Thursday, Ferguson was going for a hat trick in Friday’s second race, the County Handicap Hurdle, where his French-bred L’Eau Du Sud – a four-legged Eric Cantona – started warm favourite.

It looked for a long time like winning too. But among other things, L’Eau Du Sud was up against four horses in the colours of Limerick multimillionaire JP McManus, two of them trained by man-of-the-week Mullins.

And it was one of those, another French-bred called Absurde, who caught and passed Ferguson’s star at the finish – although, apart from the name, the only thing absurd about it was the odds of 12-1.

If that seemed generous for a horse trained by Mullins, the trainer himself helped explain: “I didn’t think he had any chance on that ground.”

Then it was the turn of Harry Redknapp, Thursday’s other winning football manager, to be cruelly deprived on Friday of a victory he must have thought certain.

His horse The Jukebox Man seemed to have the Cheltenham Hill all to himself at the start of the run-in to the Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle.

But the 33-1 chance Stellar Story emerged from somewhere in the next parish and, finishing like a rocket under 20-year-old Antrim jockey Sam Ewing, caught Redknapp’s on the line to win by a nose.

It was Ewing’s first Cheltenham Festival win and also brought great relief to the horse’s owner, a plucky underdog named Michael O’Leary, who hadn’t won this week yet despite 23 previous runners.

“Oh, the pain,” sighed O’Leary to the many wellwishers, adding: “What’s rare is wonderful.”

Among those who shook his hand was Redknapp. But maybe the latter’s accompanying comment was another case for the Ryanair’s customer complaints department. “Don’t be greedy, Harry,” laughed O’Leary at whatever Redknapp said.

If nobody could compete with Mullins and Galopin Des Champs in the Gold Cup, one of the co-owners of 50-1 outsider The Real Whacker at least made a big impression in the parade ring.

The festival had already included a “slow fashion” day, with prizes for the best use of recycled clothes. Now Davy Mann, a hotelier from Rathkeale, Co Limerick, appeared to be the sole entrant in a “snow fashion” competition, being dressed in a full-length white fur coat.

The weather had certainly been unpredictable this week, with some heavy rain and going to match. But the chances of snow were about the same as of The Real Whacker winning the Gold Cup, something not even Mann thought possible. “We’re up against savage competition here,” he admitted.

[ Cheltenham: Empire strikes back on Ireland’s least successful day ]

Friday’s racing was preceded by a ceremony to mark the centenary of the Gold Cup, a race first run in 1924. Trainers and jockeys who had won it multiple times in recent years carried banners proclaiming the names of all the former champions.

The many Irish successes down the decades began early, with “the Sligo mare”, Ballinode, in 1925. Early champions also included Easter Hero, a dual winner in 1929-30, trained in Britain but bred in Meath by a farmer who named it in honour of the 1916 Rising.

Meath can also claim a share in the horse considered Cheltenham’s all-time-greatest, Arkle, aka “Himself”, who was born there but bred and trained on the Dublin side of the county border, before winning three Gold Cups in the 1960s, the last by a margin of 30 lengths.

He remains the shortest priced-favourite in the race’s history, having started at odds of 1/10.

Friday’s commemorative banner holders included jockeys Ruby Walsh, Mick Fitzgerald and Barry Geraghty, as well as trainers Henry de Bromhead and Jonjo O’Neill. As a jockey, O’Neill rode Dawn Run to Gold Cup victory in 1986 – still the only horse to complete the double of that race and the Champion Hurdle.

A minor subplot of Alex Ferguson’s last-day defeat was to decide the largely ignored Prestbury Cup, the competition that pits Irish and British trainers against each other. It made the score 14-8 to the visitors – an unassailable lead in a festival reduced this year to 27 races. Ireland went on to add four more wins on Friday, for a final score of 18-9.

Frank McNally

Frank McNally

Frank McNally is an Irish Times journalist and chief writer of An Irish Diary

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