If the tension in the Cheltenham weighing room this week starts to get a little too much, then Harry Cobden may well be the man to diffuse it.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a joker,” he tells Standard Sport, the conversation coming about after fellow jockey Charlie Deutsch revealed that, in the usually nervy final minutes before heading out to ride in the Ladbrokes Trophy earlier this season, while others were in game-face mode, Cobden was busy dancing.
“Remember that video going around when Diego Maradona died of him juggling the football in the warm-up and there’s a song playing in the background - was it Opus or something like that?”
Indeed it was, Live is Life being the song in question.
“Yeah, we were playing that! It’s very, very random stuff on the playlist.
“I do take it seriously,” he hastens to add. “But at the end of the day there’s a point to how seriously you can take it. You’ve got to enjoy it and you’re better off going out there relaxed than all uptight.”
It is that approach that Cobden is hoping will serve him well as he returns to a track that has not always been the kindest this week.
“I saw a stat when I rode my last winner there [in November] that I hadn’t had a winner at Cheltenham in more than a year,” he says, the kind of drought that might be run of the mill for most jockeys at a course where no degree of success comes easy, but it still rankles with a rider of Cobden’s standing.
At just 23, the No1 stable jockey to British champion trainer Paul Nicholls has already ridden well over 500 career winners, 123 of them coming last season alone before his campaign and challenge for a maiden jockeys’ title were curtailed by injury at Aintree.
Even for the best, Cheltenham presents a unique challenge - “you’ve got fences on every angle, downhill, uphill, corners, bends - you’ve got to be a bit of a pilot to get yourself round there” - but Cobden puts his recent fallow run down to neither track nor his own unquestionable ability.
“To be honest with you, it’s because I’ve been beaten 20 lengths or more on every horse I’ve ridden at Cheltenham in the last I-don’t-know-how-long,” he says . “If you’ve got a horse good enough you can ride a winner round there. If you put AP McCoy on a donkey he’s not going to beat Arkle with someone else on, is he?”
The last time Cobden rode one good enough at the Festival was in 2019, when Topofthegame won what was then called the RSA Novices’ Chase and it is in the same contest - now the Brown Advisory - that he and Nicholls team up with what is “certainly our best chance of a winner”, Bravemansgame.
“He’s been faultless so far,” Cobden says, summing up what has been a refreshingly aggressive first campaign over fences, the horse having in taken in graduation and intermediate contests against more experienced rivals, before landing a Grade 1 at Christmas and a handicap off top weight at Newbury last month, passing every test with flying colours.
“I rode Topofthegame and he’s absolutely as good as him,” he adds. “I think he’s improved immensely for fences and I’m very, very excited about him.”
There were similar levels of enthusiasm, if not quite confidence, heading into last year’s Festival, when Bravemansgame lined up among the leading contenders in the Ballymore Novices’ Hurdle, only to be readily kicked out of the way by the brilliant Bob Olinger, eventually finishing third.
It is well-documented that the Nicholls team were left stunned by the manner in which their horse was beaten and Cobden has “watched the replay back many a time”, eventually coming to the conclusion that: “I just don’t feel we saw his best ever performance - or that’s what I’m hoping anyway.”
Another Nicholls-trained runner, Stage Star, is Cobden’s mount in the same race this year, having trodden a similar path to Bravemansgame 12 months ago, winning the Grade 1 Challow Hurdle at Newbury en route to the Festival.
The pair, who run in back-to-back races on Wednesday afternoon, represent the cream of a small-but-select Ditcheat battalion, with Nicholls set to have fewer than 15 runners this week, having made no secret of all season of his intention to aim some of his best horses at more winnable prizes elsewhere.
As the man with the pleasure of riding them - but also with only two Festival wins to his name - you can’t help but wonder whether that modus operandi might be a source of frustration to Cobden.
“To be honest, I’m absolutely delighted he’s said that,” he says, quickly putting that theory to bed. “I don’t want to go and make up the numbers.
“I think we’re much better off targeting a race we can win because if you go to Cheltenham, yeah, the owners can have a nice day out, the horse can run a career-best finish sixth and it’s all well and good but we want the best for the horse and at the end of the season we’ll have had a lot more winners for doing it.”
You get the feeling that being able to dance to the tune of just one this week would do very nicely, indeed.
The Cheltenham Festival will be broadcast live on ITV1 from 12.40pm–4.30pm on Tuesday 15 - Friday 18, March. For more info visit greatbritishracing.com
