Robin Oakley

The unacknowledged stars of the jump season

There are achievements to mark that didn’t earn official awards

My personal award for Sportsman of the Year goes to jockey Paddy Brennan [David Ashdown / Contributor]

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.

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