Kauto Star? To win the Gold Cup at Cheltenham this afternoon? For the third time? Really? Have you any idea how statistically unlikely such a victory is? He is 12 years old, for Pete’s sake, which is two years older than any Gold Cup winner since 1969. Also, bear in mind that it was touch-and-go whether he would run at Cheltenham at all after a recent accident in the schooling arena.
But the world is not too troubled by reason. “The heart”, Pascal noticed, “has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” And in Kauto Star the heart has its reasons in spades. Every now and then a horse comes along that so captures a nation’s heart that it canters from the back pages of newspapers to vie for space with all the news at the front. Desert Orchid, Red Rum and Arkle did that in Britain, just as Seabiscuit did in America.
Kauto Star is to horseracing what Pele and Lionel Messi are to football, what Rod Laver and Roger Federer are to tennis; what Stirling Moss is to motor racing, and Muhammad Ali to boxing.
But when the heart flutters for Kauto Star, it also has some cause to. He may be on the edge of retiring, but in 2009 he became the first horse to regain the Gold Cup, and last Boxing Day made history by becoming the first to win a fifth King George VI Chase. He has won £2.4 million in prize-money.
Should Kauto Star triumph today, matching Arkle’s three Gold Cup wins, he may rank as the best chaser ever. Against him, Sam Waley-Cohen, on Long Run, is seeking to become the first amateur jockey to bag the Gold Cup twice. Since either winner (or neither) would stir or sadden in their own way, the Gold Cup is shaping up to be the sort of race that heartstrings were made to be tugged for. Which beats sober horse sense any day, doesn’t it?