Michael O’Leary grabbed the headlines all right but not in the way everyone expected. Four winners on the last day of Cheltenham – an unprecedented feat for an owner – came in a week when he was hogging the limelight for other reasons. “I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven – again and again and again,” said the Ryanair boss as he led his fourth winner Savello into the parade ring. “The only little down is that Bryan Cooper would have been on two of them today,” he said, remembering the stable jockey who suffered a broken leg earlier in the week.
What irony that his replacement was Davy Russell, the rider whom Cooper replaced after injury at last year’s festival and to whom he later lost the job as O’Leary’s retainer. Russell was also mindful of Cooper’s loss, as well as conscious of the way in which some people were writing him off as a 34-year-old riding “has-been”.
“It’s a lesson to anybody who gets knocked in their career,” he said. “Keep your mouth shut and you move on, and you try to do the best for yourself.” Of Cooper’s injury, he added: “It was me last year and it’s the boy’s [turn] this year and it’s very unfortunate but there’s nothing really you can do. It’s our job and they’re the risks we take.”
Russell crowned a treble yesterday with a Gold Cup win on Lord Windermere, battling across the line in the tightest of finishes and then surviving a grilling from the officials. Stewards inquiries are nerve-wracking “even if you win a maiden hurdle at Thurles” but “obviously I was on the best horse in the race”.
Willie Mullins, who trained runner-up On His Own, might disagree with that verdict but he had some compensation with another winner yesterday – his fourth of the week and a festival trainers’ title to add to it.
It was a special moment too for Jim Culloty, who rode Best Mate to win three Gold Cups and has now trained one. He was joined by his wife Susie Samworth and their children, Art (9), Eliza (7) and Hugh (4), to share in the celebrations.
After photographs with the famous golden trophy, the trio headed off with a minder but not before Susie, herself an ex-jockey, barked the instruction: “Not too many Skittles.” Indeed not, careers in the saddle may lie ahead.
There were other great stories from yesterday’s haul of six winners, Noel Meade’s nursing of Very Wood to the starting post after an overnight infection and Liam Lennon’s small-town victory with Tammy’s Hill in the Foxhunter Chase. The Newry trainer explained how the trip from Northern Ireland was masterminded with the precision of Aidan O’Brien.
“I said to the boys, ‘what I want you to do is stop at a service station every two hours once you’re off the ferry to get a pick of grass’, but half way through the journey none was found and they had to bunk into a farmer’s field. The farmer told them to go but they said ‘don’t worry, this horse is going to win at Cheltenham’. ‘That’s okay so’, he said.”
Six Irish-trained winners yesterday boosted the raiding tally to 12, with the home team training 15 winners and lifting the inaugural Prestbury Cup.
