Davy Russell - regular Festival winner came from a vintage crop

It’s hard to imagine that there’s been a finer vintage of Irish jockeys than those born in 1979. Ruby Walsh, Barry Geraghty and Davy Russell were all born within months of each other in that year and Russell has now joined his contemporaries in hanging up his saddle following the retirements of Walsh, after the 2019 Punchestown Festival, and Geraghty the following summer. Walsh and Geraghty are the two most successful jockeys at the Cheltenham Festival since the Second World War and their retirements briefly left Russell, who rode 25 winners at the Festival, as the leading active jockey at the meeting. Apart from Walsh and Geraghty, only Sir Anthony McCoy – five years their senior but very much part of the same generation – has had more success at the Festival. Of those jockeys still riding, only Brian Hughes had ridden more winners over jumps at the time of Russell’s retirement.

Unlike Walsh, Geraghty and McCoy who all rode for British stables for much of their careers, Russell’s success at the Festival was all the more noteworthy for being based mainly in Ireland (two of his early Festival winners were for Ferdy Murphy) where he was champion on three occasions, 2011/12, 2012/13 and 2017/18, having been a champion point-to-point rider earlier in his career.

He was the leading jockey at the Festival only once, in 2018, with four winners, but what made Russell’s Festival record special was that he rode at least one winner there for 13 consecutive seasons, starting with Native Jack in the Cross Country Chase in 2006 and ending with that four-timer 12 years later.

His final three Festival winners came in 2020 on Envoi Allen in the Ballymore Novices’ Hurdle, Samcro in the Golden Miller Novices’ Chase and Chosen Mate in the Grand Annual, all three of them trained by Gordon Elliott, Russell’s greatest supporter in the latter part of his career and a fellow rider from their amateur days. Elliott was also the trainer of Liberty Dance, after whose win at Thurles on Sunday Russell announced his retirement, and of his final Grade 1 winner, Three Stripe Life in the Mersey Novices’ Hurdle at Aintree in April.

Russell’s greatest day at the Festival came on the Friday of the 2014 meeting when he rode a treble, with the highlight coming when seizing a short-head victory in a dramatic Cheltenham Gold Cup aboard the Jim Culloty-trained Lord Windermere, the same horse who’d provided Russell with his 2013 Festival winner in the RSA Chase. Russell didn’t look happy for the first half of the Gold Cup, the jockey reporting afterwards that he thought he might end up pulling him up, after Lord Windermere raced in snatches in the rear, but they were in touch by the second last and stayed on to lead on the run-in before Lord Windermere hung badly right in the last hundred yards, carrying the placed horses with him which prompted a stewards’ inquiry.

Russell rode what he called ‘the horse of my lifetime’ that afternoon but he wasn’t referring to his Gold Cup winner. Earlier on the card, he won the Triumph Hurdle on Tiger Roll, a horse who would not only earn a special place of his own in Cheltenham Festival history but in Aintree’s too. Both Tiger Roll and Russell’s third winner that day, Savello in the Grand Annual, were trained by Elliott for Gigginstown House Stud whose owner Michael O’Leary had sacked Russell as his number-one jockey, over an infamous cup of tea, just months earlier at Punchestown on New Year’s Eve. However, Russell’s successor to that post, Bryan Cooper, broke his leg in a fall on the second day of the Festival which resulted in Russell being called up for those two wins in the maroon and white colours.

Russell became retained jockey to Gigginstown in 2007 and rode his first Festival winner in their colours on the Charles Byrnes-trained Weapon’s Amnesty in the 2009 Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle, the same horse following up under Russell in the RSA Chase twelve months later. First Lieutenant, Sir des Champs and Balko des Flos, whose 2018 win under a fine ride from Russell gave O’Leary an elusive first success in the race he sponsors, the Ryanair Chase, were among Russell’s other Festival winners in the Gigginstown colours but it will be his association with Tiger Roll for which he will be best remembered despite the fact that he rode him in only five races.

Russell rode Tiger Roll at the Punchestown Festival after winning the Triumph Hurdle but it was to be another four years before they were reunited again during which time Tiger Roll had won twice more at the Cheltenham Festival, in the National Hunt Chase and his first Cross Country Chase. The latter win had come under Keith Donoghue who couldn’t do the weight in the 2018 Grand National which Russell contested as the oldest jockey in the race at the age of 38.

Tiger Roll provided him with his first Grand National win at the fourteenth attempt though Russell wasn’t immediately sure they’d held on in a photo-finish. ‘Tiger Roll has a reputation for being a bit of a monkey and it was early enough to send him on [after the final fence], for sure, but I needed to wake him up. I didn’t really get stuck into him until after the elbow and just had enough to get home, though I did fear we’d been beaten.’ They had only a head to spare at the post with runner-up Pleasant Company reducing their lead with every stride.

Tiger Roll had won a second Cross Country Chase under Donoghue by the time Russell was back in the saddle on Tiger Roll for the 2019 Grand National. Russell enjoyed an armchair ride on the 4/1 favourite as Tiger Roll became the first since Red Rum to win successive editions of the race. Tiger Roll looked the winner under a motionless Russell even before he’d taken up the running, still on the bridle, jumping the last and was ridden out firmly – ‘I was just a bit afraid he might get a puncture like last year’ his jockey said afterwards – to beat Magic of Light by two and three quarter lengths.

Little more than a month later, Russell emulated Fred Winter by adding a Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris to his Gold Cup and Grand National victories when successful in France’s most important chase on Carriacou on his very first ride over the Auteuil fences.

Russell partnered Tiger Roll for the final time in this year’s Cross Country Chase after Tiger Roll had won the race for a third time in 2021, once again with Donoghue in the saddle.

It turned out to be Tiger Roll’s very last race and, having lost his form in the intervening 12 months, he showed all his old zest again only to suffer an agonising defeat, after being collared in the final 100 yards at the hands of younger stablemate Delta Work who’d won a Pertemps Final and three Grade 1 novice chases in Ireland under Russell in the past.

In recognition of it being his final race and his superb record at the Festival, Tiger Roll accompanied Delta Work into the parade ring after the race where both horses were unsaddled in the spot reserved for the winner to a rousing reception from the crowd. What wasn’t apparent was that it also proved to be the final time at the Cheltenham Festival that Russell would be in that spot in the winner’s enclosure where he’d been so many times before.

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