Three things we will learn on the final day of Cheltenham Festival
LAST CHANCE: Envoi Allen has one more shot at Gold Cup glory. Pic: Healy Racing
An old gunfighter will buckle up his Cheltenham holster for the final time in the Gold Cup (4.00) this afternoon. Envoi Allen has woven himself into the festival tapestry as much as a false start and the twelve-year-old is making his eighth visit to the meeting. A truly remarkable combination of soundness and attitude in a sport that can be physically tortuous for the participants.
He was one of several high-cost purchases by the Thompson family, who own the prominent Chevely Park stud, when they decided to invest in Irish national hunt racing more than a decade ago. It proved to be a wise move with horses of the calibre of Allaho and A Plus Tard among others joining Envoi Allen on their honour roll.
The Muhtathir gelding cost them ÂŁ400 thousand as a for-year-old and was Initially sent to Gordon Elliot. He won his first eleven starts for the Meath man, including five grade ones, two of them at the festival, but was transferred to Henry de Bromhead during the fallout from Gordonâs notorious photographic escapade.
He took him a while to settle into his new digs but has won half a dozen races since, five of them at grade one level, including the Ryanair Chase three years ago. Very few horses win three different races at the festival, and none has ever won four. Today will be his thirty-first time to face the starter and he has won seventeen times already. Can he make it eighteen?
A massive horse he stands at seventeen hands, and although his jumping could be a bit wobbly when he was younger, now that he is old and wise it has become much more dependable.
The questions remains if he has the stamina and if he will have enough zip in legs that have carried him for a dozen years to endure such an arduous race. He has won over three miles on several occasions at Down Royal, but the extra two furlongs and a hill are unknown unknowns for him.
His trainer is convinced he can go close. âI think he has a chance,â he says, âI really do, I am kind of wondering why I havenât run him in the Gold Cup for the past couple of years.âÂ
Just one more gunfight stands between him and Cheltenham immortality.
âA rose,â said Juliet, desperately trying to convince herself that it was a clever idea to throw a shape at a lad from a rival family and that her Romeo âby any other name would smell as sweet.âÂ
She was wrong. Names are very important and the ones allocated to racehorses can be instrumental in defining their brand, engagement, and legacy with the racing public.
Trends over recent years have altered many of the traditional naming conventions and like any kind of change, adjustment isnât easy. The massive investments from the Middle East in flat racing brought an influx of horses named in the Arabic languages which was new to western ears.Â
More recently there has been the trend to source national hunt stock in France, which again was another challenge for the mostly monolingual Irish and British racegoers.
More recently there has been another new movement - horses with names without a space or punctuation in their title. For instance, running this afternoon, we have Tackletommywoowoo, Wrappedupinmay and of course, Inothewayurthinkin who returns to defend his Gold Cup Title.
Arguably, Gavin Cromwellâs stable star has yet to fully capture the imagination and affection normally afforded to an Irish Gold Cup winner. This could be down to his unpredictability on the track but there could also be the fact that his name is an unpunctuated, misspelt sentence. It will be interesting to see if warmer familiarity develops if he manages to win again this afternoon.
Meanwhile Cromwell is responsible for one of the better named horses running later today. The Passing Wife goes in the Albert Bartlett Hurdle (3.20) but there is no suspiciously secret code in his name. By the stallion Passing Glance out of the mare Red Wifey heâs simply been called after Mammy and Daddy.
Speaking of brilliantly named creatures, Grand National winning jockey Ryan Mania rides the well fancied Minella Study in todayâs opening race, the Triumph Hurdle.Â
Mania took five years off soon after he won at Aintree in 2013 aboard Auroras Encore for Sue Smith but returned in 2019 and has been scraping along since but without a really high-profile horse to ride. Minella Study might change that.
Trained on a beach in Northumberland under the scenic Bamburgh castle by the former flat jockey, Adam Nicol who also has a couple of hundred competitive racing pigeons housed at his stable.Â
He is convinced that training pigeons and horses have positive overlaps that have improved his expertise in both codes. âAnimals are creatures of habit,â he said in a recent interview. âYou canât just click your fingers, and it takes time. Youâve got to get them fit.âÂ
Despite his eccentric and unusual back story, Minella Study is Britainâs highest rated juvenile hurdler and was an impressive six and a half-length winner of a trial for todayâs race at Cheltenham in mid-December under Ryan Mania.Â
Second that day was Winston Junior who franked the form when finishing a clear second to Saratoga in a red-hot juvenile handicap on Tuesday. Minella Study has been backed into third favourite behind two of Willie Mullins nine runners, Proactif and Selma De Vary who might need to be âcatching pigeonsâ today to beat him.
