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Below Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Native River
he Tizzard family – trainer Colin, wife Pauline, and their children and Assistant Trainers Joe and Kim –
Perhaps surprisingly, the family went their separate ways to watch the race unfold. Except for Pauline, who was so anxious she couldn’t watch at all (“Mum gets so nervous she can’t watch a race around Newton Abbott,” Joe laughs, “let alone the Cheltenham Gold Cup.”) Kim stood with travelling head lad Richie Young at the end of the chute, while Joe didn’t leave the paddock, instead staring at one of the big screens “although someone was talking to me throughout the first circuit. I was thinking, ‘don’t you realise what’s going on here?’” Colin, meanwhile, took up position in the grandstand with Native River’s owners Garth and Anne Brooks. “I’m the opposite of Pauline,” he explains in his lovely Dorset burr. “I always feel I owe it to the horse to watch every moment of any race so I didn’t take my eyes off him the whole way round.” He and Johnson had a game plan, “but I kept thinking, ‘is this the best plan?’ Richard was going to go out and make it into a stamina race, but we ran the risk of being a pacemaker to (the Nicky Henderson-trained) Might Bite. Really, we couldn’t have set it up any better for him. But then good old Native River’s stamina kicked in. He stuck his head out and outstayed them all. It was just brilliant to watch.” “As the horse was led in to the winner’s enclosure the family all sort of came together and grabbed a quick hug or a quick kiss,” Kim adds, “and then suddenly we were in a whirlwind…” “It was an absolute whirlwind,” Colin continues. “We had a lovely time. It cost me a fortune in Champagne, that pink stuff must be £100 a bottle... but it was fantastic. Afterwards you think, ‘Christ, we’ve just won the Cheltenham Gold Cup’. That’s everybody’s dream. I never thought at any time in the last 40 years since we’ve been playing about with horses that I’d ever have a runner in the Cheltenham Gold Cup – certainly in the first 20 years anyway – and then Native River came along and did it. “After the day’s racing had finished, they re-ran the Cheltenham Gold Cup for us and I kept saying, ‘go on, play it again’. I must have watched it about six times that night and then twice the next day, but I haven’t looked at it since.” “That’s it, you see,” Joe adds. “Although that day can never be taken away from us, it doesn’t last forever. Yes we’ve won it, but you can’t just sit back, can you? The racing carries on.”
are sitting around the kitchen table of their Dorset farmhouse, drinking tea and talking about this year’s Cheltenham Gold Cup, when Colin finally realised a long-held dream of training the winning horse. It is the feature race at The Festival TM presented by Magners, the ultimate test of bravery, and in 2018 it was a classic that will surely go down as one of the best races in modern times. The Tizzard-trained Native River, ridden by Richard Johnson, galloped relentlessly, showing dogged determination and an absolute refusal to let gutsy favourite Might Bite pass him. It was a battle of epic proportions in which the courageous chestnut with the striking white blaze led from start to finish.
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