As one tilt at racing immortality came up short, another even more elusive achievement suddenly came into sharp focus as Inothewayurthinkin, in the famous green and gold colors of JP McManus, powered away from Galopin Des Champs, the defending two-time champion, to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup by six lengths.
There are still just four horses with three Gold Cup victories to their name, and there is still just one — Golden Miller, who features on both lists — who has won the Gold Cup and the Grand National in the same season, 91 years ago in 1934.
However, within a month there could be two, if McManus and Gavin Cromwell, Inothewayurthinkin’s trainer, decide that the seven-year-old has come out of Friday’s race well enough to take his place in the 34-strong field at Aintree on April 5.
Photo: AFP
McManus was understandably cautious about the possibility of Inothewayurthinkin going to Liverpool as he savored his latest Gold Cup success, and referenced the fact that Synchronised, his only previous winner of this race, received a fatal injury while galloping loose in the National in 2012, a few weeks after his Gold Cup success.
He also experienced the painful loss of Corbetts Cross in Friday’s race, in a fall at the second last. “We have to be fair to the horse,” McManus said. “The Gold Cup is a tough race. I’ll see what Gavin says, but don’t expect a decision in the next week.”
Aintree is a very different challenge these days — there were no fallers at all in last season’s National — and McManus is also the greatest enthusiast for jump racing that the sport has seen in recent decades.
Photo: Reuters
He would need no reminding of the historic achievement that is now within Inothewayurthinkin’s grasp, or of the fact that his horse, already the 7-1 favorite for the Grand National before Friday’s race, is now about 3-1 to complete jumping’s most elusive double.
McManus, whose tilts at the betting have long been the stuff of festival legend, told an interviewer recently that he does not gamble as much these days, not least because it is ever more difficult to get his money down.
He said he enjoyed the return from a different kind of gamble here, as Inothewayurthinkin, a handicap chase winner at this meeting last year, was not among the original entries for the Gold Cup and only joined the field thanks to a ￡25,000 (US$32,357) supplementary entry after Cromwell advised the owner that his horse was flying on the gallops and it might be a good idea.
Photo: Reuters
McManus backed Cromwell’s judgment, and welcomed back his second Gold Cup winner as a result, thanks to a confident ride by Mark Walsh and perhaps a slightly below-par run by Galopin Des Champs.
The odds-on favorite had finished about seven lengths in front of Inothewayurthinkin in the Irish Gold Cup at Leopardstown last year, but was rarely travelling or jumping with his usual fluency here and could not respond as Walsh sent the winner into the lead between the final two fences.
A good jump at the last sealed his success and Inothewayurthinkin crossed the line as a ready winner with something left in the tank.
There is of course no such thing as an easy race in the Gold Cup and Inothewayurthinkin would be the subject of the closest scrutiny at Cromwell’s yard in the days ahead, looking for any hint that he has done enough for now.
“Galopin Des Champs was a dual Gold Cup winner, but we were coming here to try and win the race,” Cromwell said. “We weren’t coming to pick up the pieces and get place money.”
“Probably it was my fault that he wasn’t entered in the race because I thought it was going to come too soon in his career and we’d be better waiting for next year,” Cromwell said.
He went to the Dublin Racing festival [in February] and ran such a big race, and he’s come forward since that,” he said.
He added of the Grand National: “I think we’ll all catch our breath and get the horse home, and we’ll be having the conversation later on, but I suppose you certainly can’t rule it out and it is tempting. It’s certainly something to think about.”
Meanwhile, McManus was able to reflect on an unlikely sequence of events that had taken him to the Gold Cup winner’s enclosure once again.
“He’s by Walk In The Park, and as a yearling, Charles O’Brien bought him [Walk In The Park] for ourselves and he failed the [vet’s] test afterwards,” McManus said.
“Then he went on to be second in the Derby for someone else, and if I’d got him, he’d have been gelded and I’d have no Gold Cup winner, so the Lord works in mysterious ways,” he said.
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