For long parts of a dramatic Gold Cup it looked, at least to the untrained eye, like Paul Townend couldn’t do right for doing wrong. Time and again the winning Gold Cup jockey seemed to ride himself and his mount into trouble only for Galopin Des Champs to bail them out.
Detached from the rest of the field in the opening stages, an armchair sage could reasonably have argued that it was only the sluggish pace set by the leaders that allowed them to catch up. Such a view would have flown resolutely in the face of AP McCoy’s post-race analysis, in which he praised Townend for producing “as brilliant a ride as I have ever seen on a racecourse”.
