Jumping for joy | 29 October 2015

Thank God for jump racing. The Flat has its glitz and speed and glamour, and we could not help but thrill to the sheer quality on view at Ascot’s Champions Day this year with Solow and Muhaarar strutting their stuff. But as Jack Dowdeswell, champion jump jockey in the days when it was £3 a ride and a fiver for a winner, once said of the Flat: ‘In the end it is just going down and coming back.’ With jump racing there is a story in every race — not just the thrills and spills from extra risks over obstacles but the promising novice chaser who catches your eye and who you follow until he runs three years later in the Gold Cup. There is the patched-up old hurdler patiently nurtured after ‘getting a leg’, who comes back and wins good races, the rough-hewn horse spotted in a farmer’s field and bought for a song who beats the £100,000 French imports at the Cheltenham Festival.