Superior drama the antidote to Festival fatigue
Racing’s heroes make up for blather surrounding Cheltenham
THERE are advantages to being an infidel in Cheltenham week. The compulsive need to gather around office TVs and bark at the screen like a stuttering seal is avoided. It is a relief to declare incomprehension when conversation starts around a boiling kettle about that day’s nap, between people who know as little about the action as you do, but gallop through their ignorance regardless.
Cheltenham is supposed to stiffen our feelings of Irishness but the entire event often leaves the uninitiated bewildered.
The dress sense of Rich Ricci, for instance, is a mystery whose meaning can only be known to those who have been immersed in the sport, and perhaps garish tweed, all their lives. It is off-putting, too, to hear the blarney about Irish invasions of the Cotswolds repeated year after year.
There is no special talent evidenced by flying an hour across the sea and spending four days drinking and gambling. Yet it is reported with an astonishment which is, one fears, only a taster of what is to come this summer when we will be asked to marvel at thousands of Irish people in France getting drunk.
Then there are the bookies. There is a very serious problem in this country, as outlined on Prime Time on Tuesday night, with gambling and in particular online betting. The attitude of bookmakers to this appears shot through with the cynicism with which they have approached the general issue of problem gamblers, but their unscrupulous business practices should not be held against the sport of racing or the Cheltenham Festival.
However, the unique relationship between gambling and racing does confer on bookies an importance not seen in other sports.
A tired old trick is the statement released by a bookmaking company revealing they narrowly avoided a huge pay-out thanks to this or that result.
Then a spokesperson for the company is interviewed and they chuckle with relief about their brush with a clean-out.
Even in cases where this is true, it is discomfiting to hear huge businesses with turnovers running to hundreds of millions so prominent in the analysis of a sport. Champions League elimination costs soccer clubs millions but that consideration rarely leads coverage of a particular result, where failings by players and managers are given more immediate attention.
Money controls soccer as it does every sport, but in racing, the space between business and the action shrinks, and the gormless prattle of a bookies’ PR spiv is one of the most annoying of the Cheltenham staples.
This can all cause those of us at a more distant remove to take in the Festival with a sceptical eye. But the cynicism wrought by the bookies, the blather that leads to Cheltenham fatigue and the Irish invasion cliches cannot obscure true sporting theatre, and over four days this week Willie Mullins and Ruby Walsh confirmed their status as heroes of Irish sport.
Even a clueless spectator could see that, and by Friday we were watching in wonder.
You had no need of a clutched docket to find Walsh’s triumph on Annie Power in Tuesday’s Champion Hurdle absolutely thrilling.
Despite the complaints of the animal rights’ fringe, there is a great beauty in a National Hunt horse in full flight, and one does not have to linger long over an interview with Walsh or Mullins to register their love for the creatures they coax to glory.
The reaction of Walsh to his victory will wallpaper the end-of-year review shows. He pumped his arm in unabashed joy as his mount steamed across the line, and it appeared there were tears in the coldest eyes in Irish sport.
MULLINS is less abrasive but just as impressive. He seems fitted with the temperament of a watchmaker in a sport that moves at a frenzied speed. The explanation for his success would probably bamboozle the uninitiated, but you did not require a financial stake in his brilliance to understand something of it over recent days. That he was awarded the leading trainer prize at Cheltenham – his fourth year in a row to claim it – with four races of Friday’s card still to run, testified to his enormous current success.
Infrequent contact with racing people has always left one impression: hardness.
Their sport could be easily mistaken for an industry, but the fortunes being made are dependent upon the tough working lives of jockeys and many trainers.
Cold, wet, forbiddingly early starts, days spent latticing Ireland and Britain in hire cars on anonymous roads and the tireless threat of serious injury or death are constant antidotes against complacency and delusions of grandeur.
These are tough people who eschew sentiment as promptly as they pass over the dessert menu. That was evident in the dignified but clinical reaction of Mullins to the Gold Cup.
An interviewer tried to encourage a feel-good answer about Djakadam when stating that second-place finishes in consecutive Gold Cups was remarkable for such a young horse.
Mullins replied that perhaps the horse was not suited to the race; the trainer was already planning for the future, and sentiment had no place in his calculations.
The race was a fitting end to four days that survived hype and hot air to produce sporting drama of a superior kind.
‘RACING WILL LEAVE YOU WITH ONE IMPRESSION: HARDNESS’