The turf | 31 January 2019

Last Saturday morning, Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google, was on the radio explaining his algorithm for happiness, apparently a publishing sensation. Happiness, it seems, is equal to or greater than the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be.

That was a tricky proposition for the 20,000 of us on the way to Cheltenham Festival’s trials day likely to have a few bets and facing a fiendishly difficult racecard. Trials day is the final opportunity for trainers to test out their best prospects for a desperately prized win at the Festival in March. Could this one stay an extra four furlongs? Can that one cope with Cheltenham’s idiosyncratic undulations? Is my leading owner’s pride and joy just a decent handicapper or has he got that extra touch of class? The true optimists among us no doubt anticipated going home with a thick wallet; the rest expected the usual run of second places when we backed to win and fourths when we had backed each way. But pretty well all of us would return home happy as long as we saw fiercely contested races with some thrilling finishes.

For anybody with a dose of the winter glums, I can only say that there could not have been a more perfect antidote than last Saturday at Cheltenham. Listening to the joyous bubbling stream of consciousness from Bryony Frost after she has ridden a winner almost makes you feel you have been in the saddle with her. After Frodon, having led all the way, put himself into the Gold Cup picture by winning the Cotswold Chase, the crowd screaming their heroine home up the hill as the pair held off Elegant Escape, she was as ever giving all the credit to her mount.