Cheltenham: Best Mate's absence leaves a cloud
Even with Kicking King cantering regally over the line, thereby underlining the old adage that distance, weight and the going become academic when a horse has true class, the tiny voice of Henrietta Knight, the trainer of the absent Best Mate, echoed in the back of the mind: "Come on, Matey. Come on."
For three years she had sat in a tiny room at the back of the stand watching - or rather, not watching - her beloved horse knock all comers into a cocked hat around Cheltenham's green acres. It was only with about three jumps left that she would lift her eyes from the floor to see him home on the flickering television screen.
Then came the mad dash down to the course where horse, jockey and her husband Terry Biddlecombe were already making their way back to the unsaddling enclosure. You half expected to see the slim figure scoot past again, but this time she was watching the whole race with her eyes wide open.
And maybe it crossed her mind that if "Matey" had been fit, he might not have been able to hold Kicking King this time anyway.
Kicking King had always displayed class, but this was a higher class, another level of excellence. Suddenly here he was being bracketed with Arkle, Desert Orchid and Best Mate. And a few weeks ago it seemed he might not run at all. A routine trachea wash - when a tube is stuck down a horse's throat, and what is flushed out is minutely inspected - revealed an infection which, had it been treated with antibiotics, would have ruled him out of the race.
His owner, Conor Clarkson, learned of the problems from his trainer Tom Taaffe when he was driving down a drenched Spanish motorway. "Tom rang me to say the horse would not be able to run. I pulled over and it was two hours before I was able to manoeuvre the car back on to the road again."
Yesterday, as if especially for him, the skies were a paler shade of blue, the sort of day that would have graced the Derby or Ascot. That greyest of grey days in Spain was completely erased.
There had been a strange feeling in the air at Cheltenham before this blue-riband event of the steeplechasing calendar. As Knight said earlier in the week: "I was struck by many race-goers' decreased enthusiasm for the Gold Cup due to so many fancied horses dropping out, particularly our horse."
But if that had ever been strictly true, then the huge crowd for the first Gold Cup to be run on a Friday argued the reverse. No doubt, had Best Mate been running, there would have been an added frisson, but the anticipation by 3.15 was immense, with the punters firmly behind Kicking King.
"I could feel for Henrietta," said Michael Hourigan, the trainer of Beef Or Salmon, who beat Best Mate just after Christmas but who ran poorly here yesterday. "It's heartbreaking when you prepare your horse, and then things suddenly go wrong. It's like an Olympic athlete having to pull out on the day of the event and wasting four years' hard work."
But Matey's misfortune was Kicking King's gain, and another steeplechase star was born. Not that Clarkson forgot the absent friend. "I feel sorry for Best Mate's connections. He is a great champion and it would be a privilege to run against him. Hopefully he will be back next year."
And so said everybody else.