The aptly named Lough Derg was among the runners in yesterday's big race. It was a 50-1 chance and, short of its owners renaming it "Lourdes", it could hardly win. But it didn't need to win to make it another purgatorial day for the pilgrims circling the course here in search of redemption, writes Frank McNallyin Cheltenham.
When the race's hot favourite Black Jack Ketchum fell at the first, punters must have wondered what they'd done to so offend Heaven, apart from taking up betting.
The day had already seen the demise of the equally well-fancied Monet's Garden, which inspired a growing Depressionist movement among race-goers when it could finish only fourth in the Ryanair Chase.
After that, the last cause for hope seemed to reside in the wasted features of one AP McCoy. The great jockey cuts a gaunt figure at the best of times.
But he really did look like a Lough Derg pilgrim yesterday as he struggled to make the minimum weight - 10 stone 3 - for his JP McManus-owned mount in the fourth race.
After judging the Best Dressed Ladies competition, Chanelle McCoy confirmed the exciting news (for McCoy backers anyway) that her husband had enjoyed a hearty breakfast of one cup of tea "with five sugars". As for food, he had not eaten any since Wednesday. The combination of a JP horse and an AP crash weight loss programme could only mean one thing, punters concluded.
And although some of us fretted that Tony might have overdone it with the sugars, the horse's tumbling price seemed to underline a JP betting coup in the making. But if this was one of the legendary gambler's gambles, it failed. The horse finished 14th.
There was no relief even in the form of high-priced Irish winners that we could cheer home, while ignoring our losses.
It was typical of the festival's last two days that, in the Best Dressed Ladies competition, all Ireland could win was a prize for "accessories".
In racing terms, Nenagh-born Anne Tarrant would not even qualify as an Irish runner, since she competes these days out of Newmarket, where she lives with her English husband. Her accessories were English too. So the greatest source of Irish pride was in the aforementioned and impeccably turned-out judge, who flew the flag with her Louise Kennedy coat and Philip Treacy hat.
Ms McCoy was well qualified to adjudicate, having triumphed in the fiercely competitive Ladies Day event at Galway, after which - it has to be said - the Cheltenham event is only trotting. But as she admitted: that was July and this was March.
She and the other judges were looking for clothes that reflected the "slightly wintry" conditions.
The wintry look was certainly in on the festival's third day, as a chill wind and the extinction of so many hot favourites had race-goers flipping their collars. It was the sort of day that made you miss the warming effect of the election campaign at home. Except that, luckily, there is no escaping this, even in Cheltenham.
With Michael O'Leary's wife at home expecting their second baby, she couldn't present the prize for the Ryanair Chase this year. Of course, her husband is far too shy and retiring to do the job himself so instead the task fell to Evelyn Cawley, wife of his deputy chief executive, also an Independent election candidate for Wicklow.
A mother of four, Cawley will run on the issue of planning, something she feels passionate enough about to have recently completed a post-graduate degree on the subject. "It's about quality of life for our children," she said.
Asked if she had a realistic chance of taking a seat, Evelyn resorted to terms with which we were all familiar. "I'm 6-1 with Paddy Power's," she said, "and I've been cut from 22-1 since I started."
In both environmental and betting terms, therefore, Evelyn sounds like a good thing. But the way it's gone at Cheltenham this week, not many here would have the courage to back her.
Incidentally, punters who thought it couldn't get any worse after Wednesday woke up yesterday to find that the Ides of March - as the Romans called the 15th of this month - had come. Not only that, but there was a horse running in the day's last race called Julius Caesar.
Given the experience so far, the horse should have been an odds-on favourite, ridden by Ruby Walsh. Then, when it got beaten - as favourites inevitably do this week - despairing punters could have muttered "Et Tu, Ruby?" with their last breaths.
But the latest Cheltenham festival does not even offer the relief of comic melodrama. Julius Caesar was a 100-1 chance that no sane punter would have backed and it ran accordingly.