Cheltenham Festival 2016: Sprinter Sacre makes historic return to Queen Mother Champion Chase

The horse recovered from a succession of well-documented problems

Sprinter Sacre (Getty Images)

When he first established his dominion here, Sprinter Sacre was worshipped as an idol – so statuesque, so invulnerable, that he might have been carved in marble and raised on a plinth. But this felt very different. The king was restored as a creature of flesh and blood, the fidelity of his subjects no longer contingent on gasps of awe but on tears and affection.

Over the previous two years, they had seen him humbled and confused by the sudden disparity between his physical grandeur and the insidious frailties that had begun to corrode him from within. After vaunting his power and pulchritude in runaway wins at consecutive Festivals, as a novice over fences in 2012 and then in this race, Sprinter Sacre suffered a cardiac fibrillation. He missed the 2014 Festival, and was forlornly pulled up last year. And while a comeback success at the November meeting had tested the foundations of the new grandstand, few truly believed that the veteran could regroup sufficiently to prevent the coronation of a rising star, Un De Sceaux, in the Queen Mother Champion Chase.

After all, the odds-on favourite represented the omnipotent combination of Willie Mullins and Ruby Walsh, who had already hoarded four of the first six Grade One races at the meeting. And while Nico De Boinville had Sprinter Sacre jumping with all his old gusto in Walsh’s slipstream, he was alarmed to see his rival perched so motionlessly as Un De Sceaux swept past Special Tiara on the downhill run. But then Sprinter Sacre indignantly seized hold of the bridle and, to an incredulous crescendo of shouted prayers, went bounding into the lead approaching the second last.

He was all out, in the end, to hold on by three and a half lengths. And thousands knew just how he felt, brought to a brink of emotion by his arrival at the last margins of his physical capacity. Curiously, it fell to Nicky Henderson, a trainer who has seldom disguised his sentimental investment in the horse, to anchor the delirium with the dignity and quiet relish of his bearing as he awaited the return of his champion, whose progress through the enclosures could be measured by a swelling tide of noise.

De Boinville, also, seemed immersed in a deeper satisfaction than could be felt by the rest of us – in our trite, fleeting affinity with a horse he rode at Seven Barrows even as a frustrated amateur – as Sprinter Sacre detonated a final roar of exultation entering the unsaddling enclosure. But then it is only a fortnight since the jockey lost his mother to cancer, a strain even on the sober breadth of perspective he has disclosed following his breakout success here last year, with Coneygree in the Gold Cup.

Ever since quitting university, after only a few miserable weeks, he has always found the saddle his best sanctuary in times of need. Perhaps that is why he complements these extrovert steeplechasers so beautifully. “With Sprinter Sacre, half the time it’s just a case of keeping a lid on him,” he shrugged. “He knows what he’s doing and you try not to get into his way.”

Whatever private succour De Boinville might borrow from the animal’s giant heart, he stressed his professional debt to Henderson – still, despite the inundation of Mullins champions, the most prolific trainer in Festival history. The previous afternoon he had restored My Tent Or Yours from an absence of 703 days to finish second in the Champion Hurdle, and De Boinville compared his own development under Henderson to that of the Sprinter Sacre who had arrived there from France as a raw, backward youngster.

But there were also parallels between the horse and his trainer. Few, certainly, could help musing on his own situation – fighting back against the Irish barrage – as Henderson described his champion’s revival. “There’s something that people like about this horse coming back after being dethroned,” he said. “He knows he’s good, he knows what it’s like to be at the top. And it’s tough, as they get older, to get it back. But this was a real resurrection. There were dark days, but it’s all been worth it. We had those two golden years, when he was unbeatable. I’ve been saying he couldn’t ever get back there – but to do that he can’t be far off.”

Mullins offered a generous testimony of his own. “It’s very hard to bring them back when they’ve been through something like that,” he said. “You’re creeping and crawling all the time in a bid to get the horse fit with the least amount of hard work. It’s a huge achievement.”

Mind you, it is not as though the renaissance of Sprinter Sacre represents a lasting threat to his hegemony. Nobody could sensibly burden the horse with future expectation when his past has been beyond accounting. To that extent, it was a grievous blow for the British to see Mullins turn over the exciting Yanworth with yet another young star in the Neptune Investment Novices’ Hurdle. Yorkhill looks admirably equipped to follow his stablemate, Faugheen, in graduating from this longer race to thrive for a stronger pace back at the minimum distance. “I came off the stands thinking that he looked a Champion Hurdle horse,” Mullins admitted. “Then Ruby got off and said that he’d win an Arkle Chase with his mouth open!”

A nice problem to have. But we were soon reminded that we will only ever learn his limits in adversity; and that only then can we put him on a pedestal.

Click here for latest Cheltenham racecards and odds