Irish racing guru Ted Walsh was asked at the start of Gold Cup day if retiring champion jockey Tony McCoy could win his last Cheltenham Festival race. ‘No,’ came the unsentimental reply. ‘This is Cheltenham, not Disneyland.’ But within three hours, racing’s raucous pilgrims cheered home a fairytale winner: the novice Coneygree ran his rivals ragged from the front in the hands of the young jockey Nico de Boinville and collected the Betfred Gold Cup for the ten-horse stable of Mark and Sara Bradstock, recently profiled here.
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