SPORTSWOMAN OF THE MONTH MARCH, KATIE WALSH:IN LIGHT of her location we were fortunate enough to be able to get through to Katie Walsh this week because it seemed unlikely that she'd be able to pick up a signal on her mobile phone.
Where was she? “Still on cloud nine,” she told us, after her magical experience at Cheltenham last month. And she would, she suspected, be there for some time yet.
Two rides, two winners, it was a simply breathtaking few days for the 25-year-old, but not, she insisted, a realisation of a dream, because not even in her wildest fantasies did she imagine days like these.
“People go through their racing careers without even riding one winner at Cheltenham, I never ever dreamt I’d get two – to be honest with you, I hardly dreamt I’d get one,” she said. “I’m all up in the air, I still can’t believe it.”
Memorably, of course, Walsh held off the challenge of Nina Carberry, a five-time winner in our monthly awards, in the National Hunt Chase to register her first ever Cheltenham winner on Poker De Sivola.
As Walsh put it immediately after the race, “I thought, Jesus, of all people, not Nina!”.
“It was hard to believe, all right,” she laughs. “But Nina and myself are good friends – we’re competitive, but we have fun, there’s no bitchiness or any of that. She’s had a few winners at Cheltenham and of course she wanted that one too, but there was no one happier for me.”
Two days later and Walsh did it again, this time on Thousand Stars in the Vincent O’Brien County Hurdle, her brother Ruby, who was on the favourite Tito Bustillo, among the top-class jockeys she beat.
“It was a bit like ‘is this after happening again, or am I dreaming it?’,” she says. “One was amazing, but this was . . . ah, there really are no words. I thought Thousand Stars would run well all right, but it was a very competitive race. It just all fell for me.
“I’ve been watching the replays every chance I can get. At least you know what’s going to happen,” she laughs. “It was a feeling that you just can’t put a finger on, it’s impossible to describe. It’s a feeling I certainly don’t think I’ll ever feel again. It was just amazing, such an adrenalin rush, realising you’d done it, it was absolutely fantastic.”
Walsh had travelled to Cheltenham with no great expectation of being anything but a spectator, in the end making the most, in spectacular fashion, of two late opportunities.
“It’s not so much about belief, about whether you think you can do it or not, it’s just very hard to get those opportunities,” she says. “It’s a hard sport. There are loads of people capable of doing it but you just have to be in the right place at the right time. It was fortunate for me that I was.”
It was fortunate for the judging panel, too, that Katie Walsh was given those opportunities at Cheltenham. She is, need it be said, our sportswoman of the month for March, one of the easier decisions we’ve ever had to make.
January: Aoife Hoey and Claire Bergin (Bobsleigh). The pair became the first Irish competitors to qualify for the women's Olympic bobsleigh event where they finished 17th out of 21 teams in Vancouver.
February: Jessica Kürten (Equestrian). Two World Cup qualifying series victories gave Kürten an outstanding start to the year, although the Antrim rider has been ruled out of the World Cup final in Geneva after a fall from a horse at her yard in Germany last week.
