Groans and grins
Robin Oakley
Lucky, lucky Cheltenham. By the time I reached the course on Saturday I was fuming and promising myself 'never again', at least not without the offer of a seat in somebody's helicopter. Timing their engineering works perfectly, the railways could offer only a four-hour journey from London via Bristol, Gloucester and a bus link from there. By car it took me only 40 minutes longer to get from central London to Cheltenham than it did to get from the town to the racecourse.
At the course the parking was anarchy, presided over by children. Having eventually been stuffed in behind the massed battalions of coaches I had a one-and-a-half hour wait to leave the course afterwards. When both make so little effort to accommodate their customers — or to devise, label and advertise a sensible route from the A40 — the town does not deserve its wonderful racecourse, nor does the course deserve its record crowds. But there is no substitute for quality or for the atmosphere which jumping's Mecca provides, and not just at the March Festival meeting.
A few whiffs of Gloucestershire air as I surveyed the patchwork of fields and the mellow stonework on the hills around provided immediate solace. Miriam Francome's pink wellies, sorry, Thomas Pink wellies, the talking point of the paddock, restored my sense of humour. And the roar from the crowd as Nicky Henderson's tough novice hurdler Greenhope powered around the final bend on his way to winning the first reminded us all why we were there, despite all the trials and tribulations of arrival.
Pretty well all the ritual elements were fulfilled. Nicky Henderson had that first winner, Paul Nicholls and Henrietta Knight had victories as well, while there were close-run things for Nigel Twiston-Davies and Philip Hobbs. And for the smaller yards there was a decent second, too, for Lavinia Taylor with Infrasonique. Her star, Gingembre, is recovering well, she tells me, and will be back to win the Hennessy next year. 'The great thing about jumping,' said a fellow hack as we charged down the assault course to the winner's enclosure after the second race, 'is that you see different people picking up the prizes.' I know what he meant. Nobody grudges success to such wonderful supporters of racing as Michael Tabor, the Magniers. Sheikh Mohammed, Hamdan Maktoum, Khalid Abdullah and the like, but it does all become a touch predictable. By contrast J.P. McManus had runners in the first three races on Saturday and didn't make a place. (The fall of his Risk Assessor, who seemed to have forgotten that fences have to be jumped, took both me and the Leader of the Commons, Robin Cook, normally a canny punter, out of the placepot in only the second race.) Mind you, if you do see a good variety of National Hunt owners in the winner's enclosure, they are often standing next to one particular trainer. Martin Pipe. The little man from Nicolashayne not only took the feature race, the Thomas Pink Gold Cup, for the third time in four years with the favourite, Shooting Light, but supplied the third and fourth as well, joking 'I don't know what went wrong' about his failure to make it one, two and three. He has now trained the winner of the race five times. It is a measure of the stable's standards that after It Takes Time, a big strong horse built and bought for chasing, had completed five wins in a row in the Tote Handicap Hurdle, jockey Tony McCoy declared that the handicap hurdler had previously been a hit disappointing.
Pipe himself had thought that Hobbs's Brother Joe would beat It Takes Time at the weights but he was tipping Shooting Light to all and sundry. 'I hope you weren't tipping that as well,' I enquired after Image de Marque II had won the final novices hurdle, with form figures of PP04. Martin agreed he hadn't, but again the stable's realism and confidence showed when son David told me, 'I was telling people he had a chance. It wasn't really the greatest of races by Cheltenham standards.'
The Pipes are as popular as anybody on the track these days. Their winners are applauded long and hard into the enclosure and deservedly so. They never stop thinking about how to improve things, whether with diet, exercise or accommodation, and it was interesting to hear Martin talk about the indoor loose schooling of horses like Shooting Light, explaining that getting them to jump 15 or 16 obstacles on their own with no jockey aboard teaches the animal to think for itself and to learn to shorten its stride when required. Nice to know that McCoy has only a steering job!
The day's hard-luck story was surely that of Nigel Twiston-Davies, Beau had led most of the way in the Intervet Chase and looked likely to resume winning ways after a disappointing time last season, until he clouted the last and allowed Henrietta Knight's game mare Hati Roy go away to win. 'Why did he have to make the first mistake of his life at that fence?' groaned Twiston-Davies. After Beau ran away with the Whitbread Gold Cup two seasons ago we all hailed him as a superstar. Last year he was campaigned in all the top-class races. In truth he is only a staying handicap chaser, although a very good one. This year targets are likely to be scaled down from races like the King George. And, though he is still high in the handicap, there must be races to he won with him.
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