ONE winner at the Cheltenham Festival counts as a very successful week for me. Unless your name is Ruby Walsh, then any jockey will tell you just how hard it is to ride a winner over these four days.

I was absolutely thrilled to get my win on the board courtesy of Any Currency in the Cross-Country Chase.

I have ridden nearly 120 winners already this season, so it would have been disappointing if one of those hadn’t been at the festival. It had been seven years coming, and I am praying it won’t be another seven years until the next one!

From that perspective I just can’t get my head around Ruby Walsh’s record – 52 festival winners is mind boggling. To be that consistent year-in-year-out is exceptional. While Ruby quite rightly has been getting all the plaudits, I think Davy Russell’s record of 17 winners at 11 festivals should be highlighted. He was one of the real unsung heroes of the weighing room and never lets anyone down.

I know Willie Mullins has dominated the week with seven winners and perhaps his Annie Power put up the performance of the week by breaking the course record in winning the Stan James Champion Hurdle.

But for me, the training performance of the week has to be awarded to Nicky Henderson, who brought Sprinter Sacre back from near-retirement to win the Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase. If you’d told me at the beginning of the season that the 2013 champion chaser would reclaim his crown then I wouldn’t have believed it, but Nicky has handled him brilliantly this season to win at The Open and then at Christmas before saving him for this.

Hopefully Any Currency will be back at the festival in 2017 – I understand that’s the plan – and I would totally endorse it, given I don’t think he’d jumped or travelled as well as he did on Wednesday.

Talking of the 2017 festival, imagine a clash between Friday’s Timico Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Don Cossack and Thursday’s stars Vautour and Thistlecrack in next year’s renewal. That would be some race. And perhaps Victoria Pendleton will be back for the Foxhunters, following on from her excellent fifth on Friday. She’s been absolutely brilliant on her journey to Cheltenham and is already a brilliant ambassador for the sport.

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So there’s a slight gear change for me now as I head from Cheltenham to Fontwell on Saturday. I don’t know too much about any of them and have only ridden the Charlie Longsdon-trained Wilberdragon before.

He runs in the Warner Goodmans’ Paddy Day Conveyancing Gallop Handicap Hurdle. I rode him when he was 10th in the big end-of-season hurdle at Sandown and he has only run twice since and not since November. He wasn’t beaten far by Nabucco, who I rode to win at Ascot. A repeat of that would see him go very close indeed.

Charlie’s other two also deserve a mention. St John’s Point, who runs in the Peter and Beryl Scott Memorial Handicap Chase, has been placed in six of his 10 starts and looks to have as good a chance as any, while Midnight Shot might be able to defy top-weight in the Mercedes Benz of Chichester Handicap Hurdle.

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