Cheltenham Festival 2016 results: Annie Power banishes painful memories to win the Champion Hurdle

Mare proves a popular winner of yesterday’s big race but Douvan victory shows Gold Cup potential

Ruby Walsh celebrates riding Annie Power to victory in the Champion Hurdle (Reuters)

Every time they raise the curtain here, Willie Mullins and Ruby Walsh raise the bar anew. For the second year running, to delirious acclaim from the stands, they produced three winners and a near miss on the first day of the Festival.

Having lost the reigning champion to injury, they were simply able to replace him with a new favourite, Annie Power, to break the track record in the Champion Hurdle itself. But if their success seems inexorable, it is never metronomic. However deep the resources of their patron – throughout his spree, once again, Walsh did not have to change the silks of Rich Ricci – both men will insist that yesterday must stand out, even in their mutual reconfiguration of the modern sport, for the innate qualities of the horses themselves.

So while all present knew themselves to be in the presence of greatness, they might have obtained a better gauge had they gone to a deserted racecourse in Co Kildare a week previously.

For the few privileged to witness the final gallops of Mullins’ first-day squad at the Curragh learnt more about Douvan from the performance of Annie Power here yesterday than they did even from his own success in the Racing Post Arkle Challenge Trophy. Only when the mare surged clear, in the race that ostensibly topped the bill, could they finally trust the evidence of their own eyes at the Curragh.

Ruby Walsh celebrates after riding Annie Power to victory (Reuters)

Even Walsh had been unnerved by the ease with which Annie Power had been dismissed by Douvan. According to one who was there: “He kicked her out of the way, by six or eight lengths.” Only two inferences were possible. Either the mare was not quite good enough to win a Champion Hurdle, or Douvan was a freak even by the standards of his stable.

And now we know. One who took part in the Curragh gallop pronounced that this great, raking beast, still in his first season over fences, would win any race they cared to choose this week, from the Champion Hurdle to the Cheltenham Gold Cup itself. After watching him bounding seven lengths clear of Sizing John, Walsh having even taken a pull coming down the hill, Mullins himself was hardly demurring. “I wouldn’t have had any problem supplementing him for the Champion Hurdle,” he said. “But he stays as well, and settles. He could be – he is – a Gold Cup horse.”

As it was, he had to go off and saddle the mare who had instead been chosen to replace the sidelined Faugheen. And if Douvan had essentially been a cause of relief, there was no mistaking the sense of vindication that transported Walsh as Annie Power reached the post, four and a half lengths ahead of My Tent Or Yours.

Though he would extend his unrivalled Festival record to 48 wins when Vroum Vroum Mag outclassed her rivals for the Mares’ Hurdle, none can ever have been celebrated more demonstratively than Annie Power. Not just because her two previous visits here had resulted in the only blemishes of an otherwise immaculate career, but also because of a special affinity for the mare shared by both trainer and jockey.

For the past four or five years, Walsh has grazed her on his own paddocks during her summer break; while Mullins says that he has never seen a mare that reminded him so strongly of Dawn Run, the mare trained in the 1980s by his father, Paddy, to become the only winner of both this race and the Gold Cup.

Indeed, Walsh had prepared himself over the previous couple of days by playing back footage of Dawn Run’s Champion Hurdle. “I didn’t know whether we had the speed, but I knew we definitely had the stamina,” he said. “So I said to Willie I was going to ride her like Dawn Run: buck out and go.” Mullins, for his part, is already hoping that Ricci will authorise an attempt to emulate Dawn Run over fences. Yet if they were also to aim Douvan at the Gold Cup, they might raise a delicious paradox: the better Annie Power looks, the longer the odds will always be against her.