Day one of Cheltenham 2025 ended up 4-3 to the home team in the Anglo-Irish festival battle but the bare stat did little to sum up a day of tears, cheers and maybe even regrets.
Paul Townend’s final flight fall from State Man with the Champion Hurdle at his mercy had earlier been put in perspective by his highly charged Supreme success on Kopek Des Bordes.
Willie Mullins’s 4-6 favourite landed the race named in memory of the late Michael O’Sullivan and before the ‘off’ a spontaneous round of applause rang around the Cheltenham in tribute to the 24-year-old Cork rider.
After passing the winning post, Townend pointed to the Cork armband all the jockeys wore to remember their colleague who tragically died just over three weeks ago.
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The winner’s owner, Charlie McCarthy, also from Cork, paid tribute to the O’Sullivan family, whose other son, Alan, was there to help present the trophies.
McCarthy underwent surgery for cancer surgery last month and described the outcome as a dream come true. He also said it’s a dream far from over with the horse, a sentiment Mullins was happy to share.
“It’s always easier to have Champion Hurdle horses; it’s easier to keep them sound, and if you have one, you’re lucky. But we’re always looking for Gold Cup horses, aren’t we? But is he a Champion Chaser?” he grinned, happily juggling future options.
A crucial schooling session before the season is out could prove crucial to plans next year, although right now limits on what Kopek Des Bordes might achieve are hard to find.
Just because the question is academic as to what Lossiemouth might have achieved had she lined up in the Champion rather than the Close Bros Mares' Hurdle 40 minutes earlier doesn’t mean it won’t be asked.
Predicted disaffection at the 4-6 favourite taking the easier option got volubly trumped with applause on her return to the winners’ enclosure, yet more proof that nothing’s more popular than a winner.
But such was the ease of her success that ‘what if’ scenarios are all but inevitable. Mullins argued that Townend’s decision to stick with State Man in the big race decided things, while Lossiemouth’s owner Rich Ricci said he believed the right decision was made.
The manner of how Golden Ace’s shot to nothing in the Champion paid off, and her trainer Jeremy Scott’s logic behind it underlines how fickle the racing fates can be. “We thought we could nick a little bit of prize money, and we didn’t feel we could possibly beat Lossiemouth,” said Scott.
The danger of counting one’s chickens on such things had been emphasised earlier as the hottest Mullins hotpot of the day, Majborough, finished only third in a dramatic Arkle Trophy.
The only apparent no-hoper among the handful of runners coming into the straight was Jango Baie. Majborough’s horrendous blunder at the second last looked to hand the outcome to either L’Eau Du Sud or Only By Night, only for the favourite to come back into it on the run in.
Except from out of the clouds, Nico De Boinville galvanised Jango Baie, who’d hit 329-1 in running, to somehow get up. Not since Champ’s unlikely victory here five years ago has a top-flight race transformed so much in the final strides.
It meant bookies were spared their vigorously hyped day one festival ‘bloodbath’ of odds-on results.
Later Joseph O’Brien saddled a third winner in the Juvenile handicap hurdle when Puturhandstogether proved much too good under Mark Walsh while racing closed with victory for Hait Couleurs in the National Hunt Chase.
