Al Boum Photo was given a hero’s welcome as the Magners Cheltenham Gold Cup winner paraded through the village of Leighlinbridge on Monday evening.

It is interesting to contrast the influence last year’s Dublin Racing Festival at Leopardstown had on Cheltenham, compared to this year’s renewal.

My ducks, as Nicky English might have said, are drowning. The first three days have gone depressingly badly. I’ve had one or two placed horses here and there but not a single winner, not even anything that ran sufficiently well to lose by a nose or a short head. I cannot hit the woodwork, never mind put the ball over the bar.

Forget about it. Erase it from your memory entirely. No need to ever mention it again. The monkey is off his back forever. After all the near-misses and the talk of the glaring omission from his CV, Willie Mullins has now won the Magners Cheltenham Gold Cup. Al Boum Photo and Paul Townend ensured so with an authoritative display in the feature on the final day of the 2019 Festival.

Funny sort of week. Great week for Willie and a brilliant week for Paul Townend, but it was a funny week for me.

Not at his best, perhaps, but Altior is without defeat in 18 consecutive outings in the national hunt sphere and a world-record 13 times over fences.

He’s a winning machine on the brink of equalling a modern-day winning sequence — so why has three-time Cheltenham Festival winner Altior yet to fully capture the public imagination?

For years the hardest place in the world to tip a winner was Cheltenham. For years the hardest place in the world to back a winner was Cheltenham.

An open-looking renewal of the Coral Punchestown Gold Cup is the feature on day two of the Punchestown festival.

It’s Gold Cup day in Punchestown and while I don’t know if we’ll have the race we had last year, with Sizing John, Djakadam and Coneygree providing a brilliant spectacle, it’s still a great race.

After a seemingly endless spell of testing ground, the weather has finally changed and the forecast for next week is for mainly dry weather, with the odd shower of rain, writes Ruby Walsh.

I’m sure the majority of wallets were thin after Douvan’s collapse, writes Anthony Daly.

Yesterday was a day of near misses, but the horses ran well. I couldn’t have asked more of Melon, who just ran into a better one in the Supreme. 

A week later than intended and in Cheltenham, rather than Ascot, Un De Sceaux gets his chance in the Clarence House Chase. The change of venue doesn’t really make any difference to him, the biggest difference to the race is that it’s a £70,000 race, and it would have been a £150,000 race had it been run last week.

So much racing to busy ourselves with on St Stephen’s Day, and, at Leopardstown, Castello Sforza gets the nap to step up on his promising hurdling debut.

The National Hunt season is hitting full stride now, and thus this is a good weekend for us to begin to unwrap some of our best young horses of last season.

Normal service resumed for Willie Mullins who, after one winner but many reverses on day one, bounced back with a 194-1 treble, which included two Grade One successes, on the second day of the Punchestown festival.

The Trainers’ Championship in Britain is going down the wire, but it would be some achievement from Willie Mullins were he to win it, considering he’s based in Ireland.

Ruby Walsh will miss the Crabbie’s Grand National meeting after suffering a wrist injury in a fall at Aintree yesterday.

Newcastle-based businessman Graham Wylie, and his wife Andrea, are living the dream and surely grateful for the day they decided to have horses in training with Willie Mullins.

Our expert racing columnist Ruby Walsh picks his 10 horses to watch for 2016.

It’s a big weekend for the Graham Wylie novices, with Bellshill and Yorkhill both in action in Grade One company, and Yorkhill plays his hand first, in this afternoon’s Tolworth Hurdle at Sandown.

Hurricane Fly is collecting the pension. Douvan is going chasing and Jezki is injured and out for the foreseeable future so it looks like it is going to be a drab hurdling season. Think again. There will be a thousand great stories through the winter and ten of them could be here.

I have a day off today, but there is National Hunt racing at Wexford and Willie’s only runner is Pont De Alma, in the bumper.

Independence Day should be tough to beat in the Rainbow Communications 2-Y-O Maiden on Ulster Derby day in Down Royal.