Cheltenham Et Al: The Best of Alastair Down

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After the Gold Cup I had about three people ring me up and tell me they had had the best day’s betting of their lives so they didn’t know it was meant to run in the other race! And when the time comes I suspect my ashes will find their final resting place at the top of the hill – a place of solitude and skylarks in summer but where the denouement begins to boil to brutal in winter.

There is some cruelty in its beauty, it’s a very hard place and I have seen desperate tragedies to horse and human there and you know that those risks are being run on your behalf. I have a great memory of Jim Old at Cheltenham and I still can't believe how the day panned out on the Friday of the 1999 Festival. He then switched to the Racing Post stable, his current employers, while becoming one of the faces of Channel Four Racing until being deemed surplus to requirements nearly two years ago when many of the ‘old guard’ appeared to be ditched in favour of more photogenic presenters.Describe all the feelings the Festival bound jockeys, trainers and owners experience as this week approaches?

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I was surfing through channels thinking "you never know" and suddenly I was looking at the holy grail and not believing it. I mean, it ran, but it ran about as quick as I could – I nearly became a Republican that day I was so cross! On a quiet day, a few souls who share my blood, and some of those friends who truly understood why that blood was ever quickened in that place in the month when the hares go mad, will perform a simple ceremony.