Only a tiny proportion of those at the Cheltenham Festival this week will have ever sat on a horse of any description, let alone one good enough to run in a Champion Chase, so it is just as well that people like Mick Fitzgerald are around to let the rest of us know what it’s like.
“Riding around the old course at Cheltenham is like watching a heart-beat,” the former jockey, who won the race in 1999 on Call Equiname, tells Standard Sport. “It’s just a rhythmic pump, there’s no room for fast-fast-slow. There’s no margin for error and you know that if you make a mistake it can be catastrophic.
“If you ride an ordinary horse in a Champion Chase it’s like trying to drive a car with two flat tyres - you can’t go anywhere, it feels horrendous.
“When you ride a Call Equiname, well, it felt like I was driving a Rolls Royce and the rest of them had flat tyres.”
Given the quality of this year’s renewal, some very good jockeys riding some very good horses could very quickly be nursing punctures.
In search of a horse in the Rolls Royce mould, look no further than Shishkin, the latest model off the production line of two-mile champions out of Nicky Henderson’s Seven Barrows yard.
The eight-year-old has already won a Supreme and an Arkle and is now looking to follow stable predecessors Sprinter Sacre and Altior - who each won the race twice - with a first Champion Chase, having displayed similarly freakish ability to this point in his career.
Fitzgerald, formerly Henderson’s stable jockey and still a regular presence at Seven Barrows, has watched the trio come long one after another with almost inconceivably neat timing. He doesn’t know quite what’s in the water in Lambourn but says Henderson is “just a brilliant trainer” who “buys a really nice type of horse”.
“Sprinter at his height was very, very tough to beat,” says Fitzgerald, who will work as pundit for ITV during the Festival. “He was such a flamboyant horse, a very flashy looker. When he walked past you, he made your head turn. When Altior walked past you, he made your head turn, too.
“But Shishkin could walk past you and you would hardly notice him. He’s a professional, just gets on with it.”
There’s no prize for guessing who Fitzgerald would side with in a hypothetical race, his opinion biased by the fact that Altior has lived with him since he was retired last year.
“My confidence in him is unshakeable,” Fitzgerald says of a horse who once inspired it by winning 19 races in a row. That streak came to an end in an epic, much-billed Ascot meeting with Cyrname in 2019, but Shishkin has already come through something like an equivalent, taking on and beating Willie Mullins’ Energumene in this season’s Clarence House, a race hailed as the best in years.
Both horses went into it with unbeaten records over fences and jumping the last it looked as if Energumene’s would be preserved, only for Shishkin to prevail by a length with a powerful finishing effort eerily similar to that for which Altior was renowned.
Two schools of thought prevail ahead of their rematch on Wednesday - though it is by no means a match in the strictest sense, with another Mullins runner, Chacun Pour Soi, yet to bring his Irish form to England but potentially capable of carrying all before him if he does.
The first suggests Ascot provided Energumene with his ideal conditions and that if he couldn’t beat Shishkin there he never will; the second, that a length in a two-mile horse race is nothing and to rule out a reversal of the form is, quite simply, madness.
For Fitzgerald, it is what Shishkin has done in previous years at Cheltenham, rather than at Ascot this, that ultimately tips the balance in his favour.
“I’d rather have the horse that’s won at the Festival,” he says. “That place is unique and some horses up their game when they get there.”
If the leading protagonists all turn up at the top of theirs, it will produce the race of the week.
The Cheltenham Festival will be broadcast live on ITV1 with coverage from 12:40pm to 4:30pm each day.
