INTERVIEW EDWARD O'GRADY:THERE SEEMS to be just something about Michael O'Leary that gets people all bolshie. If it isn't pitching ideas for making people pay to use the toilet, or offering 300 jobs in return for a big shed, the Ryanair boss can provoke aggro like no one else.
Even today. You would think that throwing a wedge of the quarter-of-a-million on offer for this afternoon’s Ryanair Chase, a Grade-One, day-three festival highlight, would at least guarantee some time under the radar, but not a bit of it.
There is a strain of opinion out there that the Ryanair Chase is an abomination of a race that may pay well but contributes little to the glory of the festival and threatens to dilute the holy grail of the Gold Cup.
It’s a belief some breeders of traditional three-mile chasers cling to fervently and, among those who have never grasped the four-day festival concept to their bosom, there is a reluctance to fully embrace the new race.
That’s a strange outlook, according to Edward O’Grady, who points out the race has always been part of the Cheltenham furniture, just under different names.
Since the Co Tipperary trainer is in charge of the main Irish hope for the Ryanair, Tranquil Sea, it is hardly unnatural for him to talk up the race. But since O’Grady is the current highest-winning Irish trainer at the festival, he is also the perfect man to place it in context.
“When the decision was taken to extend the meeting to four days, it was always a logical addition to the programme. But the race, as such, has always been there. When it was the Cathcart, my father won it with Kinloch Brae, and it was the Cathcart Champion Hunters Chase when I won it with Rusty Tears (1977).
“Then it was a race for second-season novices and viewed as a stepping stone to the following year’s Gold Cup.
“People are rather more ambitious now and set their sights on the Gold Cup straight after the novice season. But this was always a logical step.
“The only difference now is that it isn’t confined to second-season novices and it’s a Grade One,” he says.
O’Grady brings the authority of 18 festival successes to the argument and, in the long term, he thinks that Tranquil Sea could follow this traditional route to the 2011 Gold Cup, perhaps the most significant aspect to today’s race.
Considering the gelding, with the distinctive white nose, won a Grade One as a novice hurdler, a major handicap at today’s distance in the Paddy Power, and a Grade Two over two miles on his warm-up at Leopardstown less than three weeks ago, such Gold Cup ambitions testify to a rare versatility.
“We are, shall we say, thinking that way, but let’s see how he gets on in his next two races. If he runs well in the Ryanair, then we will certainly consider running him at three miles on his next start,” O’Grady says.
Such lofty ambitions don’t look to be obvious fits for the likes of Poquelin, who appears to be one of those classic “in-betweeners” – horses not fast enough for two miles but who don’t last three – at whom the Ryanair is now pitched.
“Schindlers Hunt ran a great race in the Hennessy and is another I’d be worried about,” says O’Grady. “But I was very happy with the way my horse won at Leopardstown. Ruby (Walsh) is reported to have said my horse beat a lot of Grand National horses, but he won easily enough. And there’s no doubt that horses who run well here do so again.”
In time, Tranquil Sea could prove that theory even more, just as the race with the new name was always supposed to do.
