THE MOMENT would, if frozen and preserved, have sustained enough hope for a lifetime. They hadn’t got to halfway in the Gold Cup when Ruby Walsh realised he didn’t have the great Kauto Star and immediately understood what he must do. Thousands watched from the grandstand as the horse was eased to a walk and not one thought of the money lost. Instead they applauded. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” they said.
Call it the “Rocky Roberto moment.” When the bookmaker Gary Wiltshire lost £1.4m that he didn’t have laying Frankie Dettori’s seventh winner on that famous Saturday at Ascot 16 years ago, he owed lots of people lots of money. He felt especially bad about the forty grand he owed tic-tac man Rocky Roberto and called his friend with the intention of assuring him the money would eventually be paid.
As he dialled, Wiltshire impulsively changed tack and impersonated a rather sombre police officer saying a body had been dragged from a lake and Rocky’s business card had been found in the drowned man’s wallet. “Ah,” said Rocky, “that’ll be poor Gary Wiltshire,” without betraying any hint of disappointment about the debt.
That show of decency lifted Wiltshire and there was the same sense of humanity not being all bad at Prestbury Park on Friday. It was the horse that mattered; his well-being, his legacy, his right to a dignified exit. If ever a thoroughbred deserved the grand exit, it was Kauto Star. And though he often hides his sensitivity behind the unsentimental pursuit of winners, Ruby Walsh knew what to do.
In the Star’s diminished prowess there was recognition that even the winner of two Gold Cups and five King George’s is part of racing’s endless cycle; they come, they race, they rise, they grow old. No matter how good they are, in the end they give up their seats to younger, faster horses. This was the Festival that recorded the passing of the Kauto era and the arrival of new stars Sprinter Sacre and Simonsig.
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As we will remember our last sight of the old champion we will recall the Festival debuts of these two novices. Not since Master Minded in the Queen Mother Champion Chase four years ago has there anything quite so brilliant. Sprinter Sacre is, potentially, a very special horse, an equine athlete beautifully put together and blessed with a very rare combination of speed and jumping ability.
Put yourself in the car with the jockeys Barry Geraghty and Paddy Brennan as they drove from Sandown to Lambourn eight days ago. “How are you going to ride him in the Arkle Chase?” Brennan asked Geraghty of Sprinter Sacre. “I’m going to keep it very simple,” replied Geraghty. “If he doesn’t come off the bridle, all the better and I think there’s a good chance he won’t.”
This was a young horse competing for the first time in a championship race, meeting his contemporaries in the most demanding of all arenas and his jockey wasn’t sure he would have to relax his hold of the reins. Geraghty is now 32 but still young enough to be excited by the prospect of greatness. Ten years before, he had won the Arkle Chase on Moscow Flyer but this was different.
“I walked the track beforehand thinking what I would have to do while knowing it would probably be very little. One thing I gave a lot of thought to was the approach to the third last, the downhill fence. We didn’t need to be reckless at that fence, neither did we want to get too cautious.”
Though Cue Card and Al Ferof are good horses, Geraghty couldn’t see them as rivals. “We got to the front without doing anything and after the second last, I just thought there’s nothing to be gained from going mad here and after I’d taken a pull, I then heard Cue Card coming back to us. I then gave him a little squeeze and away he went. Before the race I thought he was special. This was confirmation.”
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If that was brilliant, Simonsig’s performance in the Neptune Novices’ Hurdle wasn’t far behind. What was remarkably similar was the ease with which the grey joined the leader Cotton Mill, though the latter was still moving sweetly when he suddenly ducked left at the second last hurdle and catapulted Denis O’Regan out of the saddle. The mishap was unfortunate because Cotton Mill was still going well and would have asked questions of Simonsig. Geraghty has no doubt as to the answers. “He would have had to find an awful lot more to have beaten us. I was only in second gear. Put this another way, he would have needed to sprout wings because we were ready to take off.”
If the two novices could have been ridden successfully by virtually every jockey, the rider’s other three victories were a reminder that this is not the era of McCoy and Walsh but of McCoy, Walsh and Geraghty. He has been as brilliant as they and it may be that his performance on Riverside Theatre in the Ryanair Chase was the equal of AP McCoy’s extraordinary effort on Wichita Lineman three years ago.
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“I felt that was more down to the horse,” says Geraghty. “When we got to the fourth last I felt I had to throw him into it, as if it wasn’t there, otherwise we were going to be too far back. He responded and jumped it well, did the same at the third last and we then had a chance. After the last I got to AP’s tail , asked him for one last effort and in three strides we were in front.”
McCoy had given his horse a wonderful ride and he would get a deserved reward in the Gold Cup but Geraghty, riding with a confidence that can make a jockey irresistible, delivered one of the great Festival rides. If the horse was the foremost hero, as Geraghty insists, it was only because he was inspired by his pilot.
Whatever, Geraghty won’t get carried away. On the Wednesday evening, a few hours after he’d ridden three winners, he went for a meal with his wife Paula in Cheltenham and then dropped into a hotel to meet friends.
In the lobby he was approached by a man who congratulated him on his three winners and then told him that he’d had £2,000 on Geraghty’s mount, New Year’s Eve, which finished second in the day’s final race. “I reckon if the trainer had put up the amateur Jack Quinlan who ridden him in his previous races and got the seven-pound weight allowance, he’d have won,” he said.
“Hard luck,” said Geraghty with uncommon diplomacy and in that moment one was reminded of why the applause for the vanquished Kauto Star was special.