Sport has always been a safe house for sentimentality. It acts as a point of contact between sport’s great triviality, and other feelings rooted in the world outside. The tears at the end of a county final, or a cup final, or whatever else, are always as much to do with relationships as the outcome: somebody on the field, somebody beside you, somebody no longer here. The event would just be the trigger. On those days you don’t curse the tears because they’re part of the hot, wholesome stew of feelings.
For a long time the Cheltenham Festival has been a vector for those emotions. If you were passionate about the meeting, and immersed in the storylines, you made a silent investment in the sentimentality too. It was an indulgence, of course, but so what?
Year after year it was easy to find heartening yarns of underdog stables with a big horse, taking on the world. The core narratives might have been similar, but each story had a distinctive personality and a different scent.
People like Tom Foley with Danoli in the mid-1990s. Remember? A horse bought for £7,000 who stormed the Festival with religious medals pinned to his bridle. Foley had never been on a plane before he brought the horse to Cheltenham; as soon as they were airborne he unfastened his seat belt and stood by the horse’s head.
Or Oliver Brady. For years he had been running outsiders in handicap hurdles at the Festival but in 2009 he had a leading chance with Ebadiyan in the Triumph Hurdle, the championship race for four-year-olds. Brady, a radiant and ebullient character, was nearly 70 at the time, locked in a long battle with cancer, taking 27 tablets a day and making the 180-mile round trip from his home in Monaghan to the Mater hospital in Dublin for treatment.
Training a Cheltenham winner, though, was his life’s dream and this was his chance. Enraptured, Brady wrote a poem about the horse and his neighbour Rosie McConnon recorded a song. In the event, the dream didn’t come true: the horse ducked out at the second last hurdle, when he was in front and still going well. It was a classic Cheltenham love story, finished in heartbreak and melodrama.
With those stories, though, it was never just about the ending. It was also about the months beforehand, and the day-to-day fantasy of what might be. Everybody knows that Cheltenham is the most brutal arena of them all, a giant slaughterhouse for dreams, and yet people reach an accommodation with the overbearing odds, just to give the dream a chance.
Over the last 10 years, as the Festival became the playground of multimillionaire owners and was colonised by the very biggest yards, those stories were not as plentiful, but they didn’t become extinct either. When there were a staggering 23 Irish-trained winners at the meeting two years ago there was still room on the bandwagon for Peter Fahey and Paul Hennessy.
This year it could be Jonathan Sweeney, with his smashing young chaser Churchstonewarrior. In the last 10 seasons, Sweeney has trained fewer than 20 winners on the track in Ireland. Then this horse came along.
Or David Christie, a small trainer from Derrylin, whose heart was broken in the final strides of the Hunters Chase last year by Patrick and Willie Mullins. This year he’s returning with a different horse, and the likely favourite, the dream renewed.
Dinny Walsh turned out to be a talented animal ... The human Dinny was a quare hawk
For all of racing’s flaws, and all of Cheltenham’s excesses, it is still intoxicating and compelling: the thunderous racing and the majesty of the place are all of a piece. This week, Paula, Katie, Adam and I are going as a family, 26 years after I first went with my Dad.
We used to make a day-trip for the Gold Cup. Every year the day would pass in a flash, but the sweetness of looking forward used to occupy our small talk for months. The joy of going, and the time shared, was not much greater than the pleasure of thinking about going.
The trainer Terence O’Brien is our friend and neighbour, and he’s sending a horse this year, Magnor Glory in the County Hurdle. In country places, roots spread for miles. My grandfather used to work for Terence’s father – and grandfather – on their family farm, and late in my grandfather’s life, more than 40 years ago, Terence’s father Willie named a horse after him.
Dinny Walsh turned out to be a talented animal. After a couple of wins in Ireland he was sold to England, where he was trained by John Edwards, one of the leading trainers of the time. Dinny won more races over there, including at Cheltenham’s April meeting, after which Edwards said he would be aimed at the following year’s Grand National. Every plan is perishable, but in racing the attrition rate is enormous. Not long afterwards injury finished his career.
The human Dinny was a quare hawk. A dinger at road bowling and a champion at tug-of-war, he kept greyhounds all his life – as well as a working horse for the three fields that had been in the family for generations; in Dinny’s lifetime the horse and plough were a productive pair.
Sometimes the horse would break out and Dinny would strike off on his high nelly, abandon the bike wherever he found the horse, and ride him home, bareback, with just a rope for tack, and his long legs dangling down either side, like a Cossack. Even now Mam laughs at the memory: he was still at that crazy caper in his 70s.
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Dinny died long before Katie was born, but every family tree has a long trunk. Three years ago his great granddaughter started part-time in Terence’s yard. On her first day she was introduced to a shovel, a brush and a wheel barrow, but they soon taught her how to ride too, and a new world opened in front of her.
Woodstock Stables is a cherished place that turns on hard graft and companionship and endless good humour and devotion and skill. For the last month, the horses have been on fire: three of the last five runners from the yard have won. And Magnor Glory on Friday? Why not?
We booked the Cheltenham trip months ago and have been talking about it ever since. Every good thing in life is better shared. Part of it is a sentimental journey. That part is precious.
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