‘Dessie may have lost a few battles but he always won the war’

Thirty years since Desert Orchid battled to victory in a Gold Cup like no other, trainer David Elsworth tells Marcus Armytage how the drama unfolded

‘I feel very lucky to have had a horse to put up with a trainer like me, taking all I threw at him’ ‘He glared at Yahoo. I could see he was on top. I didn’t think I would win a Gold Cup until then’

‘It was a grotty day,” David Elsworth says of March 16 1989, recalling the downpours that soaked the West Country and threatened to force the postponement of that year’s Cheltenham Gold Cup.

“I was chugging along towards Cheltenham at a point where a dual carriageway filters into one lane and Jeff Smith, an owner of mine, pulled alongside, wound the window down and said: ‘Have you heard? They’re inspecting for waterlogging.’ That’s all we want, I thought.”

Fortunately, for Elsworth, and for National Hunt racing, the desperate ground passed the inspection and what followed was a race many consider one of the greatest chases of all time, won by the Elsworth-trained Desert Orchid.

At the time, Elsworth was in his pomp. As a dual-purpose trainer, Britain has had no one to touch him before or since. Yet he had known nothing about the sport until, as a 15-year-old, his class had been set the essay “What my father does”. One girl told of how her father worked in the local racing yard of Alec Kilpatrick and it fired his imagination.

“It was an easy essay for me because I was illegitimate and I’d never met my father,” recalls Elsworth, who had been brought up by his grandparents in a council house in Wiltshire. “Until then, I hadn’t decided what to do but I used to poach rabbits on Herridge Down opposite where Alec Kilpatrick trained.

“One day, I knocked on Alec’s door. He was a formidable Scotsman, asked me what I wanted and I replied ‘a job’. I turned up on Jan 3 1955 on a bike with my suitcase. I was lucky I’d found something I wanted to do. Ferreting rabbits was all right but it wasn’t a living.”

Three months later, Kilpatrick’s Gay Donald won the Cheltenham Gold Cup and 18 months later Elsworth’s career as a jockey was launched when he won a 35-runner novice hurdle at Cheltenham. “I was like a sponge then and, surrounded by Irish lads, it all rubbed off on me. I remember every Gold Cup since 1955 but, back then, in my wildest dreams I never thought I’d train a winner of it.”

But by 1989, based at nearby Whitsbury, he was in the top echelons of training. His Rhyme ’n’ Reason had won the 1988 Grand National and Cavvies Clown had been second in that year’s Gold Cup.

At the 1989 Festival, Barnbrook Again won the first of his two Champion Chases, while, back at the yard, there were the unraced two-year-old fillies In The Groove and Dead Certain, who both became Group One horses on the Flat, and the brilliant sprinter Indian Ridge.

Yet his most popular horse by some stretch was the dashing, front-running grey Desert Orchid. He had won a series of top races over two miles, two King Georges over three miles, and a Whitbread over three miles five furlongs.

“Dessie was a man,” Elsworth says. “He was not affectionate. He was ticklish, so he’d kick at you if you touched him in the wrong place. If you were anywhere near him when he had his feed in the manger he’d chase you out of the stable. You wouldn’t hug him like a teddy bear. He was a proper horse.

“Rodney Boult rode him out and Janice Coyle, looked after him, they understood him and he understood them. It’s a cliche but it the most important relationship in a yard, the lads, lasses and the horses.”

His warm-up race for the Gold Cup had been an epic in its own right. In the Victor Chandler Chase at Ascot, he had carried 22lb more than Panto Prince and, in a ding-dong duel up the straight, won by a head.

Simon Sherwood, his jockey at the time, was eight wins from eight rides on him. However, there was one big “but” going into the race – he was markedly better going right-handed, and winning at left-handed Cheltenham had always eluded him.

“I was always going to run if I could,” says Elsworth. “The horse was strong as an ox, he was sound and he was in great form. If he couldn’t deal with it [the waterlogged ground] then no one could. I wasn’t in doubt. He was the best horse in the race and, with all due respect, it was probably a weak Gold Cup.

“If the race had been at Kempton, he’d have been a certainty but he’d run at Cheltenham [in two Champion Hurdles and two Champion Chases] without success. It was as if he couldn’t catch the wind in his sails when he was turning left-handed. We’d always been a bit bewildered that he hadn’t run well there but the thing with Dessie, he lost a few battles along the way but he always won the war.

“The trip was no problem, he could lead and you had to get by him. His welfare that day was paramount, and I don’t blame his owner, Richard Burridge, for being cautious about running – he was Desert Orchid, after all – but he was best equipped to deal with the conditions.”

Elsworth also had Cavvies Clown in the race so had divided loyalties. With the grandstands packed and everyone wanting to talk, he slipped into the foyer of the old Royal Box to watch the race on television almost in solitude.

Ten Plus took the lead coming down the hill and crossed the third last in unison with Desert Orchid. Grey day: Desert Orchid leads the Gold Cup in 1989; chaotic scenes (below) in the winner’s enclosure; trainer David Elsworth (below, left) Ten Plus did not land properly and fell. But then the mud-loving Yahoo loomed up alongside Desert Orchid and, seemingly going better, went two lengths clear at the second last.

The pair were racing wide apart but, after the last, Desert Orchid drifted over towards Yahoo. “He glared at Yahoo,” recalls Elsworth of the moment Desert Orchid began, inexorably, to establish his superiority.

“Halfway up the run-in, I could see he was on top. In all the time I’d trained, I never thought I’d win a Gold Cup until that moment and thank God he did.

“I have to say, he was a very popular winner,” says the trainer, 79, who has never courted publicity or sought the limelight. “The biggest significant factor is luck and good fortune, in life never matter in racing. I feel very lucky to have had a horse to put up with a trainer like me running him over different distances and taking everything I threw at him.”

By the mid-nineties, Elsworth had switched almost exclusively to Flat horses and in 2004 he moved to Newmarket – where he still trains today – taking Desert Orchid with him.

“He made everything easy for us,” he reflects. “It was an easy decision to retire him and he made it easy for us when he died aged 27. He wasn’t very good one morning and we were in there with him. He lifted his head, lay back down and died on us. It was almost like a movie with all his friends around waiting for him to go.”