Loyal partners

Espying Katie Walsh at Newbury with a ride for Nicky Henderson, I couldn’t help recalling one bookie’s reaction to the finish of the gruelling four-mile National Hunt Chase for amateurs at this year’s Cheltenham when she and Nina Carberry finished first and second, both earning bans for overuse of the ‘persuader’. ‘Birds first and second,’ he rasped. ‘And what about the way they used those whips?’ ‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ a gent in a camel-hair coat next to me had echoed, dreamily turning an excited shade of pink. It takes all sorts, even in a racing crowd.

Post-Festival life at Newbury, too, was a reminder of racing’s talent for renewal. OK, so neither Kauto Star nor Denman won, but in Imperial Commander we have a horse who can beat anything on the Cheltenham track. Trainer Nigel Twiston-Davies, who scores his successes unpropelled by massive financial firepower and who paraded Imperial Commander that weekend in a scorched duffel coat he had rescued from the fire, will remember the day just as much from the way his 17-year-old son Sam won the Foxhunters on Baby Run.