Sound the Riverdance klaxon. Stroke a lucky fake leprechaun beard. On 17 March at Cheltenham, let no knobbly stick go unwaved. For all its convivial, booze-soaked similarities to every other Festival day, a St Patrick’s Day at the Festival typically comes packed with a little more oomph. For “oomph”, confected marketing blarney, whether it’s the branded green scarves distributed by a well-known banter bookie, or the occasionally grating misuse of that byword for diddly-aye shamrockery that is “craic”.
Which is not to say the Cheltenham Festival has not had a long, hugely profitable and mutually agreeable relationship with the Irish, who have always been happy to immerse themselves fully in its welcoming embrace. Hyped up paddywhackery is habitually sold by broadcasters, bookies and the Jockey Club in their efforts to promote an apparently fierce four-day rivalry between the British and Irish, when in truth any perceived hostilities between the hosts and their bawdy visitors have always been completely contrived.
A sport in which winning is everything and competing owners, jockeys and trainers could scarcely be less concerned by the particular mast to which their national colours are nailed, horse racing is actually one of few sporting pursuits in which a simmering undercurrent of animosity between the two nations doesn’t exist. While the assorted members of the Irish Flooring Porter syndicate stole Thursday’s show with their bravura celebrations following the Stayers’ Hurdle, the mish-mash of accents from both sides of the Irish sea that roared Allaho and Paul Townend up the home straight in the Ryanair Chase demonstrated a more mundane truth. Most racegoers could not care less which trainer’s yard the horse on which they have bet their money has travelled from, as long as their selection wins.
“Football can be tribal but it’s not tribal here at all,” says ITV Racing frontman Ed Chamberlin, dressed appropriately for the day that was in it in an emerald green coat. “It’s all just good natured and friendly. It’s called one of the great rivalries in sport because it’s just got this undercurrent of happiness, summed up by the Guinness village, where everyone mingles and has a great time. We experienced Cheltenham without racegoers last year and it was miserable. It was desolate and it just wasn’t Cheltenham. This year, Cheltenham is Cheltenham again and the Irish are a big part of it because without them it’s just not the same.”
While Delta Work’s mugging of his universally revered stablemate Tiger Roll in Tuesday’s Cross Country Chase provided as clear an example as you’ll ever see that racing is a game in which it’s every man for himself, the largely unimportant Prestbury Cup results do at least serve the purpose of demonstrating where the financial clout in National Hunt racing currently lies.
At last year’s Festival, Irish trainers saddled a record 23 winners in 28 races over four days, rubberstamping their dominance of almost a decade. It was not ever thus, however – in 1989 they went home empty-handed for the first time in 50 years to nobody’s great surprise.
This time around, after a good showing during the first two days when UK trainers were lagging just two wins behind their Irish counterparts after 14 races, it was suggested that Ireland might pull off an unprecedented “greenwash” by blitzing through Thursday’s seven-race St Patrick’s Day card. Indeed, such was the certainty that an Irish trainer would prevail in the Turners Novice Chase, duly won by the Henry de Bromhead-trained Bob Olinger, that there were just four entries and for the first time in Festival history, no English horses entered the race.
Any prospective Irish St Patrick’s Day clean sweep came quickly unstuck, when Third Wind, out of Hughie Morrison’s decidedly English East Ilsley yard, led home a British one-two-three in the Pertemps Handicap Hurdle. An unfancied 25-1 shot, his victory prompted polite but unenthusiastic applause from the grandstand and a deluge of discarded betting slips but little or nothing in the way of bombastic Last Night At The Proms’s style patriotic fervour. As if to confirm the hoary old saw that nobody anywhere knows anything, he was the first of four British winners on the day.
This year, almost certainly in a nod to the deprivations visited upon involuntarily housebound racegoers by Covid-19 last year, record ticket sales meant all general admission enclosures for Gold Cup Day at the Cheltenham Festival sold out before the end of January for the very first time. Although race organisers have no way of knowing exactly how many of the visitors are Irish, reasonably well informed estimates suggest visitors from Dublin, Shannon and Cork airports make up at least a third of each day’s Festival crowd. According to an Economic Impact Analysis commissioned by Cheltenham Racecourse from the University of Gloucestershire, Irish fans bought 57,375 tickets for the Festival in 2016, which amounted to a healthy 30% of all those sold.
In terms of competing horses, Irish trainers saddled a quarter of the runners in 2014, a figure that steadily increased to a smidge over 40% of the collective field last year. Over the first three days of this year’s Festival, Irish entrants currently stand at an even larger 43%. Along with their British counterparts, they have all been paraded in front of a podium adjacent to a Cheltenham weighing room proudly flying the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine – a country all connected to this year’s Festival can unequivocally get behind.
