The unacknowledged stars of the jump season

The Irish aren’t just good at winning horse races: they are in the Super League when it comes to celebrating victories. After Shark Hanlon’s Hewick had collected the £90,000 first prize in the bet365 Gold Cup at Sandown Park last Saturday, the red-haired trainer said with a twinkle: ‘The plan was to go home this evening. The plan just changed.’ I hope the craic was good: the year before, when Shark had his first Grade One victory with Skyace, he went home and fed 50 calves before opening a bottle of champagne only for his boxer bitch to start producing a series of eight pups – a process that engaged him until 5 a.m.

There is nothing sinister about the name Shark. John ‘Shark’ Hanlon is a big man who earned the soubriquet as an under-14 hurler because he was about a foot taller than his contemporaries. Until the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001 he was a cattle dealer. He had, though, owned the odd horse with the great Paddy Mullins who once told him: ‘If you’re a judge of a bullock, you’re a judge of a horse.’ Shark has a real stockman’s touch: he paid only £600 for Skyace and of Hewick he told us: ‘He was a very dear horse as he cost us £850 – he was a good walker and he was only the price of a cow!’

Truth be told, it wasn’t only Shark celebrating Hewick’s victory. Since the Irish dominated Cheltenham in 2021, my approach in big races has been to select a potential winner and if that choice isn’t an Irish horse to have a saver too on the likeliest Irish entrant. Earlier that day at Sandown, I had encountered a racecourse friend I often see at Cheltenham, an intimate of many Mullinses and a man as well tuned in to the Irish racing intelligence network as a champion truffle hound is to the odour of those toothsome tubers.