The first three days of this year’s Cheltenham Festival have been a slightly more difficult sell than normal, but it is certain to be a sell‑out when National Hunt fans gather to mark a significant birthday at the foot of Cleeve Hill on Friday.
The Gold Cup was not the most important race at Cheltenham when it was first staged in 1924, an era when the National Hunt Chase, which survives to this day on the Festival’s opening afternoon, was second only to the Grand National at Aintree in terms of its prestige. But a century on from Red Splash’s victory in the first Gold Cup – a last-gasp win by a head and a neck that set a suitably high standard for the decades ahead – the race is the ultimate, undisputed test of steeplechasing’s champions.
The Gold Cup’s rise to pre-eminence, among level-weights steeplechases at least, was swift, not least thanks to the efforts of two of its earliest winners, Easter Hero and Golden Miller, both of whom then enjoyed their most spectacular moment in the spotlight a few weeks later at Aintree.
Easter Hero carried the huge burden of 12st 7lb in the 1929 Grand National, but he was sent off favourite at 9-1 and put up a magnificent display in defeat, finishing six lengths behind the winner despite racing with a twisted shoe in the final mile. Golden Miller, meanwhile, racked up a record five wins in the Gold Cup from 1932 to 1936, and in 1934, he became the first – and only – horse to win the Gold Cup and Grand National in the same season.
The natural order in jumping had now been set: the luckiest horse wins the Grand National but the best horse wins the Gold Cup. From Cottage Rake in the 1940s, to Arkle, the greatest of them all, in the 1960s, and then on to Dawn Run, Desert Orchid, Best Mate and Kauto Star, the Gold Cup’s roll of honour is a near-perfect record of National Hunt’s greatest champions, both equine and human, over the past 100 years.
In a racing discipline where the male horses are geldings, and so unable to sire the next generation of winners, the people who ride and train them are often an essential part of the history, linking one era to the next. Willie Mullins, who will saddle Galopin Des Champs, the favourite, in Friday’s Gold Cup, is the son of Paddy, who trained Dawn Run. Pat Taaffe, Arkle’s jockey, won as trainer with Captain Christy in 1974, and his son, Tom, followed suit 31 years later with Kicking King – a horse whose jockey, Barry Geraghty, is the grandson of Golden Miller’s breeder.
The Gold Cup is a race that pulls all the threads together, of form and families, friendships and rivalries, over the course of many decades. The expectant buzz at Cheltenham as the runners circle at the start has been a shared experience for generations of racegoers.
Over the years, spectators have seen winners at 1-10, when Arkle completed his hat-trick in 1966, and 100-1, when Sirrell Griffiths, a Welsh dairy farmer with three horses in his yard, pitched the apparent no-hoper Norton’s Coin against Desert Orchid in 1990, a year on from the grey’s stirring defeat of Yahoo, and stunned the stands into silence.
Norton’s Coin’s record-winning SP is one that is likely to remain intact after Friday’s race, as even Jungle Boogie, the probable outsider of the 11-strong field, is no bigger than 40-1 to give Rachael Blackmore, a second win in three years, while Mullins has already removed the possibility of notching his 100th Festival success on the Gold Cup’s official 100th birthday.
But a second successive win for Galopin Des Champs would be highly appropriate given the Mullins family’s long association with the race, while a success for the talented but fragile Monkfish would extend the link to a fresh generation as well, as Mullins’s son, Patrick, is booked for the ride.
Hopes for a first winner since 2018 from a British stable include Bravemansgame, whose trainer, Paul Nicholls, needs one more win to equal the all-time record of five, currently held by Arkle’s trainer, Tom Dreaper. Corach Rambler, who won last year’s Grand National, would be the first winner trained in Scotland, while L’Homme Presse is a big old-school chaser, whose connections are steeped in jumping tradition.
On its 100th birthday, the Gold Cup remains in remarkably good health.
