Cheltenham Festival Greats: Remembering Arkle
In the final instalment of the series highlighting the achievements of Cheltenham greats, John Ingles focuses on the remarkable Arkle.
No doubting champion credentials
We’ve covered several of the Cheltenham Greats in this series in recent weeks but none of the very best jumpers to have won at the Festival over the last fifty years or so can compare with the greatest of them all.
Arkle was a phenomenon in his own lifetime and his achievements haven’t faded six decades later. If anything, his legendary status has only grown among successive generations of racing fans who never saw him race but have read about a career marked by what seems today like extraordinary feats.
Arkle joined the Cheltenham Greats by winning three successive Gold Cups, 1964 to 1966, a hat-trick matched since only by Best Mate.
Thirty years earlier, Golden Miller, recognized as the greatest chaser of the twentieth century until Arkle came along, won five Gold Cups in the 1930s, when the race was viewed more as a Grand National trial rather than a big race in its own right, while Cottage Rake (1948-1950) is the only other triple winner in the race’s history.
But while the Gold Cup gave Arkle the opportunity to confirm himself a champion, and an outstanding one at that, in truth his Gold Cups were some of his easiest races. He faced only three rivals in his first two Golds Cups and four in his final one.
It wasn’t hard to see why few wanted to take him on at level weights. If even the other best chasers around couldn’t beat him in receipt of lumps of weight in handicaps, what possible chance did they have with him on level terms?
Extraordinary handicap achievements
Away from the Gold Cup at Cheltenham, there were few options for top staying chasers outside handicap company compared to nowadays and it was Arkle’s performances in valuable sponsored handicaps such as the Hennessy Gold Cup and Whitbread Gold Cup which did as much to ensure his legendary status as any of his Gold Cups.
These handicaps also served to reveal the true extent of Arkle’s superiority over his rivals, something that was harder to express at level weights. As a result of those performances, Arkle attained his much-discussed (and barely credible, for some!) Timeform rating of 212.
Arkle went into his first Gold Cup as the winner of eleven of his twelve starts over fences. Prior to that, he’d been beaten in a couple of bumpers and had won four of his six races over hurdles, all of them in Ireland. But he soon showed English racegoers that he was going to be a much better chaser as he made his debut over fences in the Honeybourne Chase at Cheltenham in November 1962, accompanying his stablemate Fortria who won his second Mackeson Gold Cup on the same card for Arkle’s trainer Tom Dreaper and jockey Pat Taaffe.
Arkle won by twenty lengths and when he returned to Cheltenham the following March for the Broadway Chase (nowadays the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase), he won by the same margin with Irish support making him the 4/9 favourite. But in spite of that, and further victories in the intervening twelve months – including by wide margins under 12-0 in the Thyestes and the Leopardstown Chase - which continued to build his reputation, at least in Ireland, Arkle was yet to be acknowledged as the best chaser in the British Isles when he lined up for his first Gold Cup.
He started at 7/4 but there was even more confidence in England’s big hope Mill House, sent off at 8/13, who was already being spoken of as another Golden Miller. The same age as Arkle, seven, ‘the Big Horse’ Mill House already had a Gold Cup win to his name, having given a twelve-length beating to Arkle’s stablemate Fortria at Cheltenham the previous season. Like Arkle, Mill House, trained by Fulke Walwyn at Lambourn, had only been beaten once in completed starts over fences. Mill House had won the King George VI Chase on his way to the Gold Cup but it was the result of the Hennessy Gold Cup earlier in the season which convinced many, in England at least, that Mill House would retain his Cheltenham crown.
Carrying 12-0 at Newbury, Mill House had Arkle, in receipt of 5 lb, back in third, though the result might have been different had Arkle not slipped on landing at the last ditch three out when challenging the eventual winner. Mill House and Arkle dominated the betting in the 1964 Gold Cup but the two others in the line-up, although 20/1 and 50/1 respectively were no mugs; King’s Nephew was the horse who’d inflicted Mill House’s only defeat the previous season, while Pas Seul had won the 1960 Gold Cup and finished runner-up in 1961.
Here's how the Timeform publication from this era The Racing Week set the scene for this great clash before describing the race itself:
‘Though he’s one of the biggest horses in training, with a massive girth, Mill House is extraordinarily light on his feet: he moves as if on springs, and he’s an extremely agile jumper. Arkle is less spectacular, but it was evident from his record that he possessed the better turn of foot; indeed, for a staying chaser who is inclined to take a strong hold, and who is sometimes difficult to restrain, his power of acceleration is remarkable. It seemed pretty obvious that, in order to nullify this advantage in finishing speed, Mill House would be called upon to force the pace, and would try to gallop and jump his rival to a standstill…’
‘The expected tactics were carried out, and until the last half-mile the race proceeded as had been foreseen. Mill House stretched into a three-length lead from the start, and his tremendous stride showed no sign of shortening. Nor did he make a mistake, but two out Arkle had drawn level and Willie Robinson on Mill House was pulling out all the stops. But it was all to no avail; Pat Taaffe sent Arkle into the lead at the last and drew away up the hill to win by five lengths. It’s doubtful whether any Cheltenham winner has had such a reception as they gave Arkle, who won in record time – four seconds less than the previous best.’
Arkle and Mill House meeting again
By the time Arkle and Mill House met again in the 1965 Gold Cup, Arkle had banished any doubt which of them was the better horse. The pair had crossed swords in the interim in the Hennessy again in front of a record crowd, this time Arkle carrying 12-7 and Mill House 12-4. Arkle turned in his best performance to date, pulling his way into the lead after the second fence and galloping Mill House into the ground whilst pulling clear to win by ten lengths from fellow Irish challenger Ferry Boat (receiving 35 lb). Mill House finished a tired fourth 28 lengths adrift.
Between his first two Gold Cups, Arkle’s other wins included the Irish Grand National under 12-0 and the Leopardstown Handicap Chase again, this time under 12-7. His only defeat in this twelve-month period came just a week after the Hennessy when a 3 lb penalty took his burden to 12-10 in the Massey-Ferguson Gold Cup at Cheltenham. Arkle was beaten around a length into third trying to concede 32 lb to the winner Flying Wild.
This was how The Racing Week recounted the 1965 Gold Cup, the fourth meeting between Arkle and Mill House:
‘Here we were treated to the finest display in the career of Arkle, considered now by many whose memories go beyond the days of Golden Miller, to be the greatest chaser ever to set foot on a racecourse. Arkle won this race virtually on the bit. He and Mill House matched strides for the first sixteen fences, but then the English horse made his first mistake. Though Mill House recovered the lost ground before the next jump, he was by this time a beaten horse. It was not until the turn into the straight that Pat Taaffe decided that the game of cat and mouse had gone on long enough, and he gave Arkle his head. As if sensing the importance of the occasion, Arkle put in a tremendous leap at the last fence, standing well back from the jump, and clearing it with a foot to spare. To the cheers of Englishmen and Irishmen alike, Taaffe rode Arkle out to a victory that was estimated at twenty lengths, a margin equalled only by Easter Hero in 1929 and 1930.’
More Gold Cup glory... by 30 lengths
There’s little more to say about Arkle’s third Gold Cup in 1966, beyond the bare facts that he won in a canter by thirty lengths from Dormant at odds of 1/10. No Gold Cup winner has ever won the race by a wider margin or at shorter odds. The only drama came at the final fence on the first circuit where Arkle barely took off but his momentum was hardly checked. Mill House was missing through injury this time, though he did contest the next two Gold Cups but fell in both. At his best, Mill House was an outstanding chaser in his own right, well above ‘normal’ Gold Cup-winning standards with a Timeform rating of 191, and would no doubt have won more Gold Cups himself had he not had the misfortune to be born in the same year as his even greater rival.
Arkle and Mill House had met for the fifth and final time in the autumn of 1965 at Sandown. Arkle had ended the previous season by winning the Whitbread Gold Cup at the same course under 12-7 and, under the same weight, was now being asked to concede 16 lb to his old rival in the Gallaher Gold Cup. In theory, this should have brought the two close together and, for a long way, Mill House looked like making a race of it with Arkle, but from the Pond fence Arkle began to assert and stretched clear to win by twenty lengths with Mill House back in third. Even more remarkably, Arkle took seventeen seconds off the course record Mill House himself had set the previous season.
On the way to his third and final Gold Cup, Arkle went on to win his second Hennessy (by fifteen lengths under 12-7), the King George VI Chase by a distance and the Leopardstown Handicap Chase for a third time, conceding a full three stone to the top-class mare Height o’ Fashion. It was clear from Arkle’s performances in 1965/66 that he had never been better and, had he stayed sound, he would have had excellent prospects of winning more Gold Cups, probably at least as many as Golden Miller.
The runner-up in that 1965 Hennessy, incidentally, was Freddie, receiving 32 lb from Arkle; the previous spring, Freddie had been beaten less than a length under top-weight in the Grand National! Arkle was beaten in his third attempt to win the Hennessy in 1966 but that was another race that demonstrated the yawning gap between Arkle and ‘regular’ Gold Cup-standard horses.
Legacy lives on in Festival contest
Arkle finished half a length second to Stalbridge Colonist (receiving 35 lb) and was a length and a half in front of the third What A Myth (receiving 33 lb). The same pair of rivals went on to be placed in the Cheltenham Gold Cup later the same season, Stalbridge Colonist also finishing a close third in the 1968 Gold Cup and What A Myth winning it in 1969.
What proved to be Arkle’s final race came in the 1966 King George VI Chase. There was a good reason for only his fourth defeat over fences; Arkle finished lame having cracked the pedal bone in a hoof though still finished a length second to the Gold Cup runner-up Dormant and even in the King George – not a level-weights contest in those days – he was conceding a stone and a half to the winner. Arkle’s injury didn’t signal an immediate end to his career but nearly two years later, in October 1968, Arkle’s owner, Anne, Duchess of Westminster formally announced Arkle’s retirement.
With immediate effect, Cheltenham renamed the Festival’s two-mile novices’ chase – formerly the Cotswold Chase – as the Arkle Challenge Trophy in 1969, a race nowadays sponsored by Sporting Life. It’s a measure of Arkle’s standing that for decades he was unique in being the only horse to have a Festival race named after him.
It’s also a fitting tribute to the horse who John Randall and Tony Morris, in their book A Century of Champions, described as ‘a freak, an unrepeatably lucky shake of the genetic cocktail, the nearest thing the sport has ever seen to the perfect machine.’