Declared Dead

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My hands were shaking so much I could hardly hold onto the reins. Pulling that horse in a seller at Fontwell had been bad enough, but to throw the Gold Cup in front of a crowd of forty thousand enthusiastic racegoers was a desperate and terrifying prospect. I could feel the goose bumps rising on my skin from a mixture of nerves and guilt. I patted Cartwheel on the shoulder and talked to him in a forlorn attempt to calm myself down. I just kept wishing that this whole business was a bad dream from which I would awake any moment, but the bark of the starter, telling us to get in line, brought me sharply back to reality.

Cartwheel was itching to be off and I had to tug hard on the reins to restrain him. He loved his racing and I wasn't even that confident he would go along with my plans. He was an old hand at jumping these Cheltenham fences and if I kept mistiming my take-offs to get him in close to the bottom of them, he was just as likely to think it was all a game and outwit me by standing off a stride and putting in a long one. That way I would be gaining ground instead of losing it.

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