When Leicester City defied odds of 5,000-1 to win the Premier League title, their success was widely described as the most unlikely achievement in the history of sport. And maybe it was, but if so they are a useful benchmark for this year’s jumps racing Festival at Cheltenham, a place where the extraordinary is an everyday occurrence.
Last year’s opening afternoon was, by Cheltenham standards, somewhat predictable. There were two odds-on favourites on the seven-race card, both won comfortably and the biggest price of any winner all day was 12-1. The combined odds of the seven winners? 50,982-1.
By the end of the week, the Festival had really hit its stride. Three favourites obliged on the final day, including Don Cossack in the Gold Cup, yet a £1 accumulator on the seven winners would still have made you a millionaire twice over.
This, in the end, is why the Cheltenham Festival has been British racing’s biggest success story over the last two decades, and arguably the most successful major event, in terms of its growth and popularity, in any mainstream sport. It is what keeps the crowds coming back, in ever greater numbers, from one year to the next. The Cheltenham Festival does not just sell chance and possibilities: it sells outrageous chance, and almost limitless possibilities, a few frantic minutes at a time. Year after year, Cheltenham delivers on its promises, and does so to such effect it can shrug off the loss of several star names from the cast list. Owing either to injury or retirement, none of last season’s “big four” winners of the main feature event each day – Annie Power, Sprinter Sacre, Thistlecrack and Don Cossack – will be racing this week, while several more horses that would have been major players will also be missing.
Since Christmas, every fresh report of an injury to a big-name player has been described as a “blow” but now we are here, who will actually notice the difference? The Festival will still deliver four days of the most intense and concentrated competition any sport can offer. It is big enough to cope.
But is Willie Mullins also big enough to cope? This, perhaps, is the key question, as the man who has dominated the Festival in recent seasons attempts to put a series of setbacks behind him and finish the meeting as the leading trainer for the sixth time in seven years. Annie Power and Faugheen, the last two Champion Hurdle winners, are among the horses he lost from his team because of injury but the most significant blow of all landed last autumn, when the leading owner Michael O’Leary stomped out of the yard in what was, apparently, a dispute over training fees, taking about 60 horses with him.
So far the signs for Mullins are promising. When Sheikh Mohammed sent a squadron of boxes to remove his horses from the late Sir Henry Cecil’s stable in 1995, it was a catastrophe from which Britain’s greatest post-war Flat trainer could never fully recover. There were still Classic winners, of course, and above all Frankel to secure his legend, but Cecil’s days as a championship contender were over.
Mullins is also struggling to hang on to his domestic title, as Gordon Elliott, one of the main beneficiaries of the O’Leary diaspora, hit the ground running in Ireland last summer and still has a healthy lead in the championship. Yet his success has been based as much on valuable handicaps as it has on Grade One events. At the highest level, Mullins’s dominance is – or seems to be – relatively undiminished.
It is a point Mullins will be desperate to emphasise this week. His squad for the meeting is smaller than in recent seasons, but there will still be at least half a dozen favourites going to post for the yard, and possibly more if Mullins starts the meeting well. His dispute with O’Leary will be played out throughout the meeting when horses that were stabled in County Carlow until a few months ago line up against the best of those that remain.
Whether their split was truly and simply just a matter of the bottom line may never be revealed, though with O’Leary involved, it is certainly possible.
The man who famously squeezes every penny and cent of value from Ryanair’s passengers is probably the only multimillionaire in the game who would actually notice what was, apparently, a modest increase in Mullins’s bills for the first time in years.
Most observers can sense a clash of egos, not so much between O’Leary and Mullins as with the other big owners in the yard. Above all, Mullins will hope to win the Gold Cup for the first time when his Djakadam, the runner-up in 2015 and 2016, will be up against a field including O’Leary’s Outlander, a former Mullins runner. But if Mullins’s Un De Sceaux could frustrate O’Leary’s ambitions of a first win in “his” race, the Ryanair Chase, that might well be an acceptable second-best.
Mullins v O’Leary will be one story this week, the debut of ITV Racing in the first of its four years at the Festival another. But this being Cheltenham, the defining memory after four wild days in the west country is just as likely to be something that no one could ever see coming.
