It felt like the Galway Plate and it sounded like the Galway Plate, but yesterday's £100,000 festival feature just didn't look like the Galway Plate.
All of which mattered not one whit to Dovaly who stormed up the hill to notch a 20 to 1 shock for jockey Tom Rudd and trainer Michael O'Brien. It was just that he approached that hill from a rather different angle than we are used to.
Previous Compaq Plate winners have had to negotiate the notorious pair of fences in the dip before tackling the Ballybrit Eiger but not this time as a medical team tended to a stricken jockey that had fallen between the two fences on the first circuit.
That meant a half mile run-in that changed the complexion of the race completely. The free-running Duinin, who had stretched them from a circuit to go, suddenly faded as Dovaly and Palette challenged, with Monty's Pass finishing best of all on the outside.
Monty's Pass got to within three lengths of the winner but his frustrated trainer Jimmy Mangan declared: "If the last two fences had been there it would have been a different story. My horse is not a flat horse."
Mangan, who won the 1997 Plate with Stroll Home, wasn't alone in thinking about what might have been but Rudd and O'Brien were happy just to consider the here and now and the prospect of a celebration.
Rudd gasped: "I had to lose 5lbs for this. I was training with the Nenagh Rugby Club yesterday and I just want to thank them for helping me. I'm not really surprised he's won."
In hindsight the rest of us shouldn't have been surprised either as O'Brien, who is confined to a wheelchair and was unable to attend due to the crowds, said Dovaly had finished on the heels of the winner in seventh last year and had benefited from the removal of blinkers.
But the focus yesterday was on the dip where the Turf Club medical officer Dr Walter Halley had to be decisive in a difficult situation. Ross Geraghty had had a heavy fall when unseated from Feeling Grand at the sixth fence and was still on the ground as the field approached again. English rider Warren Marston had also fallen at the sixth and received attention too.
"I had to make a quick decision and the two minutes I had was not long enough to make a conscious medical decision so we bypassed the fences. They are too close together to just bypass one," Halley said.
Geraghty was later described as "shaken" but Marston was stood down for 48 hours with concussion. "It's much easier to make a decision in the interests of safety and it would have been much worse if they had not got up," said Halley.
Last year's winner Moscow Express chased Duinin into the dip but faded to fifth while Duinin's rider Philip Carberry said: "I don't know if I can say that bypassing the fences cost me the race but they would have helped me."
The well-backed favourite Super Franky had a bad start and was afterwards found to be in respiratory distress but Dovaly's owner Sean Mulryan had a different post-race problem.
"I'm struggling with shock!" said Roscommon-born Mulryan. "For someone from the west this is the ultimate."
Western success is nothing new for Dermot Weld but this week could yet turn out to be special for him as a treble yesterday brought him to within just five of breaking the record set by Senator JJ Parkinson for the number of winners trained in Ireland.
After Sage Dancer had won the amateur riders maiden and the odds-on Step With Style had also obliged, Weld described himself as "on target" for the record but then the Monday-night flop Initial Figure absolutely waltzed home in the last.
"He coughed five times after the race on Monday but he scoped clean and I think he may have swallowed something," said Weld.
She's Wonderful, in foal to Kings Theatre, was best in the 12-furlong handicap for teenage rider Tom Queally, while Cotopaxi sprang a 14 to 1 surprise in the opener.
