Townend puts brickbats and blunder to bed with brilliant Gold Cup win

F or long parts of a dramatic Gold Cup it looked, at least to the untrained eye, like Paul Townend couldn’t do right for doing wrong. Time and again the winning Gold Cup jockey seemed to ride himself and his mount into trouble only for Galopin Des Champs to bail them out.

Detached from the rest of the field in the opening stages, an armchair sage could reasonably have argued that it was only the sluggish pace set by the leaders that allowed them to catch up. Such a view would have flown resolutely in the face of AP McCoy’s post-race analysis, in which he praised Townend for producing “as brilliant a ride as I have ever seen on a racecourse”.

Oblivious to the plaudits of his former colleague, Townend seemed to assess things differently in the aftermath of victory, which suggested that beneath his apparently calm exterior some mid-race nerves had definitely kicked in. “It was messy for me,” he said. “I couldn’t get a clean passage early and he started jumping in the air a little bit but he came back into a rhythm with me and was very, very brave. I think he got me out of a fair hole, to be honest.”

Despite running away with the leading jockeys’ title at this year’s Festival, Townend has not been immune to brickbats and went into the Gold Cup with pressure piled on his slender shoulders and the echoes of criticism for a couple of recent sub-par performances on Facile Vega in the Supreme Novice Hurdle and Appreciate It in the Turners Novice Chase echoing in his ears.

If the opprobrium bothered him, he hid it well and delivered a ride that earned him uncharacteristically effusive praise from the man who had legged him up. “Paul is so good under pressure and I’ve been putting him under some fair pressure this week,” said