Gordon Elliott: 'People say Cheltenham isn’t everything but Cheltenham is everything'
Trainer Gordon Elliott string on the gallops on Monday morning ahead of the 2023 Cheltenham Festival. Picture: Healy Racing
The group of Irish racing press amble past Spring Valley, Hen’s Ring and The Duck Walk, up the incline to the now familiar viewing area at the end of the rising gallop chiselled out of Meath soil along with the rest of a pristine paradise for premium jump horses.
This remarkable training centre was once a greenfield site and has been plucked from the mind’s eye of Gordon Elliott, who leads the way towards the lookout, sharing small talk.
The various names on barns or rings within Cullentra House come from places of meaning and no meaning. Spring Valley is the family home in Summerhill. Hen’s Ring is a nod to triple Gold Cup-winning trainer Henrietta Knight, still in hot demand for her judgement of young stock and ability to teach young horses to jump, or older ones that have lost their way.
The Duck Walk? Well, that’s just where a duck and her chicks used to waddle past at the same time every day.
Forty horses canter past, led by two of Elliott’s leading Cheltenham hopes, Gold Cup fancy Conflated and Turners’ Novice Chase favourite Mighty Potter and in behind, the likes of Teahupoo, Gerri Colombe Three Card Brag, Better Days Ahead, Delta Work, Galvin, Fil Dor, Zanahiyr, Riviere D’etel, Maxxum, Pied Piper… you get the drift.
He embraces the pressure of bringing between 50 and 60 horses to the place and the festival he says unapologetically “is everything”, though he delegates so much of the actual logistics of the transfer, not just of horses, but feed, hay, water and the staff themselves.
This is what he got into it for. He has always spoken of not understanding why people aren’t driven to be champion in their field. It was that ambition that brought him here, having begun and trained his first of three Grand National winners, Silver Birch, in the rented premises of Capranny Stables.
It is the same with Cheltenham. If you’re not under pressure, you don’t have the horses.
“We’re probably coming in a little under the radar this year,” said Elliott yesterday morning. “But if you go down through them, we’ve a good team there. I’d be very happy and the horses are running well.
“I love it. There’s nothing like it and I can’t wait. I go over on Sunday, get into the house, then walk the track. There’s nowhere like it.
“People say Cheltenham isn’t everything but Cheltenham is everything. Cheltenham is the Olympics of our sport and that’s where we want to be winning. And if we don’t get a winner out of it, I’ll be very disappointed.”
He jokes that as a Meath football supporter, he knows how to keep ploughing through disappointment. But the reality is that racing is such a relentless affair that you don’t have time to dwell on it. You don’t even have time to dwell on success.
“If you win the All-Ireland or the Champions League, you’re champion for a year. In horse racing you get 20 minutes if you’re lucky.
“If you win the Coral Cup, you probably have three other disappointed owners in the same race. You have to be able to lose as well as win. Keep going. If you let it get you down you won’t last too long in this game. More bad days than good.”
He is 45 on Thursday and is heading out to Dubai for a three-day break. This afternoon though, he’ll be thrown on the couch, drilling into the weights that will have been released for the Cheltenham handicaps. And he promises that he won’t be getting hot under the collar about whatever Irish penalty BHA handicapper Martin Greenwood and his team apply to his entrants. He’ll just try to solve the puzzle.
He has done well in these contests over the years but there are a slew of Grade 1s in among the 34 Festival winners that have the former Martin Pipe pupil in fifth on the all-time trainers’ list despite his youth. And he would have had six more but for the suspension that ruled him out in 2021, three of his horses winning under the temporary stewardship of ‘Sneezy’ Foster and three more doing so having been removed from the yard, though Galvin returned to the fold.
It is a stunning return, the highlight of which was Don Cossack’s Gold Cup triumph in 2016 but he is forever looking forward.
“We’ve had a great season. I think we’ve 191 or 192 winners between England and Ireland, a couple in America as well, so we can’t complain. It’s been a good season and we’ve a lot of nice, young horses. When you see those horses winning bumpers, they’re the future, so we’re happy.”
