An abiding personal memory of the Cheltenham Festival is the sound of almost complete silence after the 1990 Gold Cup. Sixty-thousand racegoers slowly absorbed the fact that Norton’s Coin, a 100-1 shot saddled by a Welsh dairy farmer who trained a few jumpers as a hobby, had just beaten the country’s most popular chaser, Desert Orchid.
Sirrell Griffiths’s win with Norton’s Coin remains the biggest upset at the Festival, not just in the Gold Cup, but in any race. When set against some of the likely outcomes at next week’s Festival – when Willie Mullins is 1-7 to be the leading trainer and the Irish range from 1-9 to 1-25 to have the most winners – there is a distinct sense it belongs to a different age, in fact, almost a different sport.
