David Ord reflects on the career of Master Minded who set the bar impossibly high on his first visit to Cheltenham.
In last week’s feature – recounting the top five performances at the Festival over the last 20 years – people felt one horse was missing.
Master Minded was a dual Champion Chase winner who landed eight Grade Ones in total. But somehow even that haul felt underwhelming.
And that was purely because of the impression he’d made at Cheltenham in the spring of 2008.
He only joined Paul Nicholls the previous autumn and raced in the Kauto Star silks of Clive Smith. For a while he looked set to eclipse even that remarkable horse’s achievements.
He got no further than the third on his British debut at Exeter and when he won a handicap chase at Sandown from a mark of 145 a month later there was little to suggest he would be rated 186 a mere 12 weeks down the line.
But he was and his upward trajectory at the time suggested we were watching a horse who was going to take two-mile chasing into previously uncharted waters.
As, under a motionless Ruby Walsh, he scooted a widening 19 lengths clear of defending champion Voy Por Ustedes, Fair Along a further 16 lengths away in third, you were left struggling to comprehend what had happened.
A month earlier he’d beaten the same horse, who was thought to be in need of the run, five lengths in the Game Spirit in receipt of six pounds.
To progress from that to this in the space of five weeks was scarcely believable. And surely he’d only just started?
Well to a degree he had. In 2009 he was to win at Cheltenham again having brushed aside his rivals in the Tingle Creek and Victor Chandler at Ascot, but the X-factor was missing. He beat the veteran Well Chief, on the comeback trail after a spell out injured, by seven lengths. But it was a display that lacked the fluency or pizazz of the previous year. Timeform rated it 15 pounds inferior.
And that was it for him in terms of Cheltenham Festival victories.
He was a legless fourth behind Big Zeb in 2010 and looked beaten when losing any chance with a shuddering mistake two out in the race won by Sizing Europe 12 months later.
In between he won another Victor Chandler and Game Spirit, a Kerrygold Champion Chase at Punchestown and Aintree’s Melling Chase over two-and-a-half miles.
We’re still talking about a top-class racehorse, of whom Walsh said “he’s not a machine, he’s an aeroplane”. Paul Nicholls was happy to label Master Minded "the best I’ve trained".
His only fault was he showed us so early what he was capable of, that jaw-dropping display in his first Champion Chase which proved an impossible act to follow.
Everything else he achieved was in the shadows of that one afternoon. He’d set his own bar too high – but how gloriously he did it.
