"Special place, special meeting." Donn McClean takes a trip down memory lane as he explains just what the Cheltenham Festival means to him.
The Irish and the Cheltenham Gold Cup
There are Cheltenham memories all right, Gold Cup memories, in sitting rooms and on televisions, at home and in friends’ houses, so far away that it was absolutely unreachable and almost magical. L’Escargot and Glencaraig Lady and Ten Up and Captain Christy, before your time and legendary by consequence. Legends that you read about in racing books with glossy black and white photographs
Then legend morphs into memory. Tied Cottage falling at the last when upsides Alverton. Tied Cottage winning and then losing.
Years later you get there and you try to take it all in. You stand at the top of the stands and you inhale the racecourse, from the final fence and the hill, and the winning post that sits unassumingly for now at the top of it, all the way to Cleeve Hill, beyond the racecourse’s confines but still a part of it all. And you walk down the back straight for the first time, past the hurdles and the water jumps and the open ditches, and you can’t believe how privileged you are to be there.
Special place, special meeting. The week into which the entire National Hunt season funnels, often providing the barometer by which the entire season is measured.
Special moments too. Like Dawn Run's Gold Cup. I wasn't there, I was down at the back of the chemistry lab with my friend and his yellow transistor radio, listening to the commentary and the static and getting into trouble with Mr Kelly.
"Well, did she win?"
"She did, sir."
Imperial Call was 10 years later, when you tried to hold your binoculars steady in order to see him and Conor O’Dwyer coasting down the hill alongside Richard Dunwoody and One Man, then coming away from him over the last two fences – binoculars down – and up the run-in. And 10 years after that, Conor O’Dwyer again, punching War Of Attrition to victory.
War Of Attrition was special all right. Twenty-six days earlier, you had stood on the gallop at Everardsgrange with Mouse Morris (see above re privileged) and watched as O’Dwyer put the Gigginstown House horse through his paces. Gigginstown House then weren’t the Gigginstown House behemoth that they subsequently became, but they were growing, and it was massive that they had a horse with a chance in the Gold Cup.
It was massive for Mouse Morris too, 20 years after he had won the Champion Chase with Buck House. And another Irish-trained Gold Cup winner, two in a row, the year after Kicking King.
There were more Irish Gold Cup winners, and they all had resonance. The Jim Culloty-trained Lord Windermere and Davy Russell getting up to just deny On His Own and David Casey, an Irish 1-2 and Willie Mullins just foiled again in his quest for a first. The culmination of a special day for Davy Russell.
Don Cossack under Bryan Cooper in 2016, Gigginstown House again and Gordon Elliott’s first Gold Cup, justifying the faith that the trainer has always retained in his horse. Sizing John in 2017, Jessica Harrington’s first, Robbie Power’s first, bounding over the final fence and up the hill. A Cheltenham Gold Cup to go with his Irish Gold Cup (previously) and his Punchestown Gold Cup (subsequently).
And Al Boum Photo last year, under a superb ride by Paul Townend. A first for the rider and for his trainer Willie Mullins, finally, correcting an anomaly that had existed in racing’s tiny universe for a little while.
More memories to be created soon.
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