Disneyland comes to the Cheltenham Festival

Irish racing guru Ted Walsh was asked at the start of Gold Cup day if retiring champion jockey Tony McCoy could win his last Cheltenham Festival race. ‘No,’ came the unsentimental reply. ‘This is Cheltenham, not Disneyland.’ But within three hours, racing’s raucous pilgrims cheered home a fairytale winner: the novice Coneygree ran his rivals ragged from the front in the hands of the young jockey Nico de Boinville and collected the Betfred Gold Cup for the ten-horse stable of Mark and Sara Bradstock, recently profiled here.

Said former trainer Charlie Brooks, ‘That was the best victory ever in the history of horse-racing,’ and his opinion had plenty of takers. The Bradstock family have suffered enough afflictions to engage a clinic-full of consultants and stretch their meagre resources to twanging point to keep their small show on their excellent gallops. The Bradstocks, and Sara’s mother Chicky, had bought Coneygree’s mother Plaid Maid to give Sara’s father, the late John Oaksey, for many of us the instigator of our joy in racing, some breeding fun in retirement. Now here they were at the summit of the jumping Olympics and some of the toughest cheeks you will ever encounter bore tears of joy.

Cheltenham had already showcased fantastic quality, notably on the first day when Douvan, Un De Sceaux and the Champion Hurdle winner Faugheen, all from the powerhouse Willie Mullins operation, dominated their fields. When Mullins’s Annie Power came to the last hurdle leading in the mares’ championship, it looked as though the bookies were about to take their biggest pasting ever. Sadly, Annie Power took off too soon and somersaulted. With many accumulators riding on her, the fall saved the bookmakers £70 million.