A great British winner

Cheltenham is hopelessly associated in the public mind with gentility. Retired colonels from the Indian empire went to spend their declining years in this vapid Gloucestershire town. With its spa, its boarding houses, its literary festival and its expensive boarding school for young ladies, it is not a place guaranteed to quicken the blood. Not normally.

But once a year, just as Britain is emerging from its long, wet, dark winter, Cheltenham plays host to something elemental and furious. In the middle of March it becomes the stately setting for a week of bacchanalian frenzy and riot. This is the three-day-long festival of National Hunt racing - nothing less than a celebration of man's ancient connection with the horse - which starts today.

My pulse quickens and my senses awake just by thinking about the Cheltenham Festival. With its undulating track and famously demanding uphill finish in front of the stands, it has long been known as the supreme test of courage and stamina for the racehorse anywhere in the world. And so it is. But what is far less appreciated is the fact that Cheltenham provides a yet more gruelling test of the staying power of the human being.

Consider this. The horse has to run in only one race. The punter in the stands has to solve 20 contests spread over the three days. This is a task that requires the solitary industry of a medieval scholar and the cryptographical expertise of a wartime M15 officer in Bletchley Park. He must evaluate scraps of form from tiny tracks in Ireland, peer deep into the blank wall that constitutes the mind of champion trainer Martin Pipe, guess which serial nontriers have been brought to their peak just this one day in their lives and just for this one occasion. He must have the courage and inner conviction to reach his own opinion separate from the frenzies of the crowd and the lure of fashionable opinion. He must know the effect of the going, and the special characteristics of the jockeys.

These are cerebral things. Yet the Cheltenham punter must also possess the brute physical strength of a prop forward in order to fight his way into the seething ring where the betting action happens, or through the scrum that forms around the packed racecourse bars in order to get a drink.

At the end of the day, the Cheltenham racehorse is led back to its stables, given a rub down, a good dinner, a bucket of water and put to bed. But the endurance test for the human being is only just beginning. People, quite respectable people, go to Cheltenham for the three days and never take lodgings on the solid grounds that the cost of hotel accommodation would represent an outrageous diversion from their betting fund. So they spend the night in the bars or attempting to redeem the losses they have made at the racecourse in one of the card schools that assemble for the duration in the town.

A quick shave, a solid breakfast and they head out back towards the course. The place floats on draught Guinness and whiskey chasers. Wellbuilt men, at the peak of their condition, with years of racegoing experience behind them, stride confidently into Cheltenham racecourse on the first day of the festival. Three days later they emerge as gibbering, broken figures, emaciated, grey-faced and wretched. It takes a supreme human athlete to survive Cheltenham's ultimate test of moral, emotional and physical stamina.

This is where breeding and sheer class come into it. As one by one the native British punters drop away, unable to stand the relentless pace, again and again you find it is the Irish raiders who are staying on through the field. It's the Irish, not the English, who make Cheltenham what it is. They come over in their tens of thousands - an excursion that represents the single largest drain on the Irish balance of payments. The monetary authorities in Dublin make provision for it and once, at a time of economic crisis, the Irish government contemplated the imposition of exchange controls ahead of Cheltenham week.

Anyone interested in the relations between Britain and Ireland should visit Cheltenham. The history of the two countries is indeed dark and marked by tragedy. But sometimes, by brooding on the past, it is possible to overlook the ties that bind our two nations.

To be sure, there is an intense and furious rivalry at Cheltenham. Each Irish winner is celebrated like the birth of a child. Some readers of this article will be in a position to know something which I cannot: whether the great Istabraq, trained by the genius AP O'Brien at Ballydoyle, has won the Champion Hurdle, due to be raced at 3.15 this afternoon.

If he wins, this incomparable old horse will have achieved a record-breaking fourth victory in the race. In which case, I would be surprised if the racecourse does not detach itself from its solid moorings in the homely Gloucestershire countryside and float up towards the spheres.

Istabraq is owned by the legendary JP McManus, a gambler of heroic stature. The word is already out for another of his horses, Rhinestone Cowboy in the Weatherby's Champion bumper and the last race on Wednesday afternoon. McManus is one of those superlative figures who make Cheltenham the astonishing event that it is.

Another is the Queen Mother. They named the twomile champion chase after this game old girl in 1980, but did not imagine that she would still be around to watch it 22 years later.

Two years ago - Cheltenham having been cancelled in 2001 because of foot-and-mouth, a decision most of us felt with the full force of a bereavement - I remember watching her skip up to the podium to hand the prize to the winning connections. This year ill-health keeps the Queen Mother at home. But her spirit - gutsy, indomitable, phlegmatic and filled with a passionate love of life - will fill every last square inch of the magnificent natural amphitheatre that provides the setting for the greatest race meeting in the world.

Peter Oborne is political editor of The Spectator.