Cheltenham Festival Focus

Rupert ‘Ruby’ Walsh, who retired from race riding, with immediate effect, after winning the Puchestown Gold Cup on Kemboy on May 1, 2019, has the distinction of being the most successful jockey in the history of the Cheltenham Festival. Indeed, he was leading jockey at the Festival a record eleven times – in 2004, 2006, 2008-2011 and 2013-2017 – and his career total of 59 winners at the March showpiece meeting is some way ahead of his nearest rival, Barry Geraghty, with 43.

‘Mr. R.Walsh’, as he was listed on the racecard, opened his Cheltenham Festival aboard Alexander Banquet – also, coincidentally, the first of 213 Grade One winners he rode during his career – in the Weatherbys Champion Bumper in 1998. Walsh turned professional later that year and, over the next two decades, won each of the four main ‘championship’ races at least twice apiece.

Arguably his most memorable victories came aboard Kauto Star in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, in 2007 and, especially, in 2009, but he also won the Champion Hurdle four times, the Queen Mother Champion Chase four times and the Stayers’ Hurdle five times. Indeed, he won the Stayers’ Hurdle, known at the time as the ‘World Hurdle’, on the same horse, Big Buck’s, four years running in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. Just for good measure, Walsh also won the Ryanair Chase – introduced to the Festival programme in 2005, as a ‘championship’ steeplechase over the ‘intermediate’ distance of 2 miles 5 fulongs – four times, most recently on Un De Sceaux in 2017. He rode his final Cheltenham Festival winner, Klassical Dream, in the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle in 2019.

As is often repeated, Arkle is the benchmark by which every steeplechaser since the mid-Sixties has been measured. If his Timeform Annual Rating of 212 is to be believed, of the hundreds of thousands of steeplechasers to have raced in the last five decades or more, only stable companion Flyingbolt came with 30lb of Arkle.

Arkle was owned by Anne Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster, in whose iconic yellow and black colours he raced, and trained by Tom Dreaper in Ashbourne, Co. Meath. He was ridden in all 26 steeplechases, of which he won 22, by the late Pat Taaffe. As far as the Cheltenham Festival is concerned, Arkle won the Broadway Novices’ Chase – now the RSA Insurance Novices’ Chase – as a six-year-old in 1963, but will aways be best remembered for winning the Cheltenham Gold Cup three years running in 1964, 1965 and 1966.

On the first occasion, Arkle beat defending champion Mill House – potentially the best steeplechaser since the legendary Golden Miller, according to his trainer Fulke Walwyn – by five lengths and broke the course record by four seconds. On the second occasion, Arkle beat the same horse by twenty lengths and, on the third, in the absence of Mill House, sidelined with tendon trouble, beat Dormant and three other rivals by thirty lengths and upwards at prohibitive odds of 1/10; in so doing, he became the shortest-priced winner in the history of the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Whether or not his Timeform Annual Rating was exaggerated is debatable, but such was his superiority over his contemporaries that, had his career not been ended prematurely – by an injury sustained in the King George VI Chase at Kempton – in 1966, it is not difficult to envisage Arkle having added to his Cheltenham Gold Cup tally.