cottage rake, mangan goes rogue, baring bingham, broadway, watering & killing the golden goose.

​In a year when Galopin Des Champs will join the pantheon of great Cheltenham Gold Cup winners, one should not forget horses in the past who had similar career highs. Cottage Rake won the Gold Cup in 1948, 1949 and 1950, the only three-times he contested the race.
He was not an ordinary Gold Cup winner as he is possibly the only Gold Cup winner to have won both the Naas Handicap and the Irish Cesarewitch on the flat, and I doubt if many Gold Cup winners won a steeplechase carrying no less a burden as 13-stone!
He was a 10/1 shot when he won in 1948, beating Happy Home and Coloured Schoolboy more easily than the length and a half and ten suggests. In open company, Cottage Rake was not the most fluent of jumpers. It was his speed between the fences and especially his speed after the last fence that made him the great horse his record suggests he was.
Experts of the time thought Prince Regent to be his superior, though as Tom Dreaper’s first great horse was restricted to running in his homeland when in his prime due to the 2nd World War, British racegoers had to take that view on trust. He did win the 1946 Gold Cup and finished 3rd in the Grand National of the same year beaten 4-lengths and 3 by Lovely Cottage and Jack Finlay, giving 25Ibs to the winner and 31Ibs to the third. Yet the record books cannot be argued with. Cottage Rake won 3-Gold Cups, with the aid of the maestro Vincent O’Brien as his trainer, and that puts him on a theoretical par with Arkle, Best Mate, and by next Friday evening, Galopin Des Champs. One of the races at the Festival should have his name as its registered title as tribute to one of Cheltenham’s former star attractions.

R.T.E. and Racing T.V. broadcaster, the adorable Jane Mangan, has gone rogue with her best bet at the Cheltenham Festival. Twinkle-eyed lovely Jane has gone for British trainers having 10-winners at the Festival, losing 18 to 10 in the unnecessary Prestbury Cup. Other than that off-the-wall good thing, it is favourites all the way for Jane.

The Baring Bingham has attracted 23 entries, 19 trained in Ireland and 4 trained in Britain, and this race is our best chance of getting one over the Irish, with Potters Charm and my good thing of the meeting The New Lion.
Along with the Broadway Novice Chase which has only 9 entries, 7 of which are Irish trained, with the 2 British-trained entries more likely to take up other options at the meeting, a wake-up clarion should be sounding at B.H.A. headquarters as it is clear to all that the system in this country for our novice hurdlers and chasers is not working. With economics in mind, we might just as well save the Irish the expense of transporting their horses to Cheltenham each March by running all the novice hurdles and chases at a racecourse named for the day Leopardstown sur Prestbury.

They are watering at Cheltenham in order to keep moisture in the ground, mainly the New Course. The Cross-Country course remains heavy in places. I understand that for safety and welfare grounds good-to-soft might be considered the golden ticket but when did good ground become the new good-to-firm? Back in the day the overriding belief was that good ground would do no harm to any horse, yet now we must have soft in the going description. Shakes head and moves on to other matters.

All sports events have their ups and downs. Cheltenham reached its zenith and has now plateaued. If Cheltenham want to climb from where it is now, on the downslide to a large extent, and back to pre-government restrictions, accommodation and ticket prices must fall, even if that means a diminishing in prize-money for a few years. The sport’s golden egg is rolling towards a cliff-edge, I am reliably informed by those with first-hand knowledge of Cheltenham now compared to Cheltenham past, and everyone seems to know the answer except those best placed to do something about it.