CHELTENHAM FESTIVAL REVIEW: vintage week linked Coneygree and Willie Mullins with magical memories of Dawn Run

Festival veterans will tell you that one of the most unforgettable days was Thursday 13th March 1986. Yes, it was the day ‘The Sun’ ran its most famous front-page headline, ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’. But the back pages were adorned by the mercurial mare Dawn Run, who became the first, and remains the only, horse to land the Gold Cup/Champion Hurdle double.

Even racing enthusiasts who weren’t there that day cannot fail to have been enchanted at some point in their lives by the sound, from the TV commentary vaults, of Peter O’Sullevan screaming: “And the mare’s gonna get up!.....”

Consequently, few at the 2015 Festival last week can be excused for recalling Dawn Run’s glory day 39 years ago. For in CONEYGREE, wonderful winner of the Betfred Gold Cup, we had a horse of similarly limited fencing experience and boasting similar, heart-on-sleeve attributes, pounding up the hill for a remarkable triumph. And in Willie Mullins, trainer of a record-breaking tally of eight winners, we had the eldest son of Dawn Run’s legendary trainer, the late Paddy Mullins, master of Doninga.

That Coneygree, first novice to win the blue riband event since 1974, and Mullins were the stars of the show in the Cotswolds last week, there can be no doubt.

The tumultuous success of the Bradstocks’ eight-year-old was a timely reminder to the cynics that the ‘small man’ can still defy the odds and bag the big prizes. There exists ridiculous resentment of the powerhouse operations in jumps racing. But the chilling last-flight fall of ANNIE POWER in the Mares’ Hurdle offered proof that competitive sport is not obliged to follow some money-laden script. And the Bradstocks’ achievement offered further proof that the dashing Corinthian attitude embodied by Coneygree’s inimitable breeder, Lord John Oaksey, the man who once made a hospital-bound stretcher wait while he filed a report on a Grand National he himself had fallen in, is far from dead.

Mullins’s exploits were confirmation that, in our midst, is one of the greatest trainers of all time. His 1-2-3 in the Champion Hurdle has to rank alongside the effort of Michael Dickinson, who saddled the first five home in the Gold Cup of 1983. And it was not only in the championship races that Mullins excelled. He bossed some of the handicaps too, accumulating more than £1 million in prize money as no fewer than 28 of his raiders finished in the first six. It was with open-mouthed irony that not one of the six horses he sent out to contest the Champion Bumper made it back in the first nine. But there was no escaping the all-encompassing Mullins clan because even his sister-in-law Mags conquered a Grade One, thanks to MARTELLO TOWER in the Albert Bartlett, collaring the brave MILSEAN, ridden by her son and Willie’s nephew, Danny Mullins!