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Cheltenham has changed: the days of the romantic underdog are rarer now

Even the plucky home ‘underdogs’ sole winner of the day - Chianti Classico - turned out to be Irish-bred

Derek O'Connor on Corbetts Cross and, second right, owner JP McManus, after the victory in the Maureen Mullins National Hunt Challenge Cup at Cheltenham. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho
Derek O'Connor on Corbetts Cross and, second right, owner JP McManus, after the victory in the Maureen Mullins National Hunt Challenge Cup at Cheltenham. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho
Frank McNally in Cheltenham
Tue Mar 12 2024 - 21:28

Cheltenham has changed quite a bit in the 10 years or so since I was last here. Police with automatic weapons now greet you at the entrance, for one thing.

Cleeve Hill still overlooks the track, as always. But almost as dominant a feature in the local landscape now is the reputation of Willie Mullins. The Carlow trainer bestrides Irish and British jumps racing like a colossus, with more than 60 horses running here this week, many of them favourites.

This helps explain another change at Cheltenham in the past decade: a decline in the waving of tricolours to celebrate Irish wins. It’s partly that such events have now become too commonplace for national celebration.

But it may also be because, British or Irish, winners tend increasingly to be from the bigger stables and wealthier owners. The days of the romantic underdog are gone. Even jumps racing, traditionally the flat’s poor relation, is mostly big business now.

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Sure enough, there were no tricolours to greet the first Irish winner of this year’s festival. But there was no Willie Mullins either, as it happened. He had to settle for second place as trainer Henry de Bromhead and jockey Rachael Blackmore made off with the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle on Slade Steel.

Flags or no flags, the winner nevertheless returned to rousing cheers, mostly with South Tipperary accents, thanks to the fact the owners of Slade Steel also own a pub, the Emigrant’s Rest, in Clonmel.

Regulars around the winners’ enclosure included Denis Kiely, whose noisy friends told The Irish Times: “His wife doesn’t know he’s here”. Kiely agreed: “I told her I was going to a meeting”. But he bravely gave his name to the paper anyway.

Normal business resumed in the second race when Mullins had his first win of the week, in combination with one of his more flamboyant owners, the well named ex-boss of Barclays Bank, Rich Ricci.

The latter was dressed in a pink check suit, with matching shoes. And he was even more in the pink, if that’s possible, when he and Mullins combined again on Lossiemouth, one of the festival’s hottest favourites, to claim the day’s fifth race.

In between, Mullins had also saddled State Man to win Tuesday’s big one (and the tricolour made a brief appearance here) for the colourful and extremely wealthy former Cork bookmaker, Joe Donnelly.

Donnelly and his wife Marie are also art collectors, with works by Picasso, Matisse, and Willem de Kooning. Their four-legged masterworks, meanwhile, have previously included Al Boum Photo, which won two Gold Cups here.

Now they added the Champion Hurdle to their ever-growing portfolio – although in an accent of purest Leeside, Donnelly recalled humbler origins when he knew the grandfather of the winning jockey, Paul, from their days “at the dogs in Cork”.

If there was a triumph of the underdog on Tuesday, it was when the plucky home team had their only one of the day. The English saviour took the unlikely-sounding form of a horse called Chianti Classico, which caused near raucous celebrations when taking the third race for trainer Kim Bailey.

But it has come to the point at Cheltenham where a certain amount of British success is in Ireland’s best interests, and so it proved here.

Chianti Classico is Irish-bred, by David O’Connell in Meath, and as such part of an industry that includes about 3,500 breeders, most of them small and part-time operators, owning five mares or fewer.

The UK is their biggest export market, so it’s important that the buyers there win occasionally. O’Connell wasn’t here to see his progeny triumph but was reportedly thrilled and asked friends to bring him back a racecard as souvenir.

There was a heartwarming result too in the day’s last race, the National Hunt Chase. The 2024 event was renamed in honour of Maureen Mullins, matriarch of a clan including Willie, who died recently aged 94. It was won by Corbett’s Cross, a horse saddled not by Willie, for once, but by Maureen’s grandson Emmet, a young man still in the early days of a training career.

Frank McNally

Frank McNally

Frank McNally is an Irish Times journalist and chief writer of An Irish Diary