EVERYONE knows how hard it is to get to the top. Staying there is even harder. Tougher still, and this so difficult that very few manage it, is returning to the top after losing that position, regaining the crown after it has slipped from your grasp. Paisley Park pricks up those big, generous ears and bends to the task with a will, making it look easy.

Two years ago, the star of trainer Emma Lavelle’s successful Wiltshire stable reached the mountain top with a golden, glorious victory in the Grade 1 Stayers’ Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival. Last year, Paisley Park gave up his title almost without a fight, trailing home a weary seventh in the Paddy Power-sponsored contest behind shock winner Lisnagar Oscar. This year he’s climbing the trail again, the peak in sight once more.

“That wasn’t him last year, it just wasn’t him,” says Lavelle. “He’d been working so well in the build-up to the Festival, seemed in such good order, so what happened just came out of a clear blue sky.

“In the race he never looked as comfortable as before, never looked happy. He hit his flat spot as usual but then the turbo just didn’t kick in. It wasn’t him.”

Fortunately, the reason behind Paisley’s Park lacklustre effort emerged almost immediately, and ironically the nine-year-old was partly to blame. His big heart had been a metaphorical asset in his rise, now it was a physical factor in his fall.

Post-race, the crushing aftermath of unexpected defeat for Lavelle, jockey Aidan Coleman and owner Andrew Gemmell was intensified by the realisation that this wasn’t just an off-day.

“He was very distressed after the race, very unhappy. Even as he stood there I could see his heart wasn’t beating as it should. I rested my hand on it and the rhythm was all over the place,” says Lavelle.

“When they gallop hard, horses put great pressure on their hearts and lungs. Sometimes they bleed from the lungs, but in Paisley’s case that didn’t happen and it was his heart that was affected instead. It’s the case that most very good horses have larger hearts than the norm, and so they are more prone to suffering from a fibrillating heart.

Intervention

“Sometimes it takes medical intervention to sort it out, but that night he sort of reset himself, and when [renowned Newmarket vet] Celia Marr checked him in the morning he passed all the tests, and we brought him home.”

The fact that Paisley Park had pushed his own reset button means that the problem is less likely to happen again, and in two outings this season he has shown no sign of a recurrence.

A reassuring display when runner-up to Thyme Hill in a dawdling affair at Newbury in November was followed a month later at Ascot by a performance that raised the grandstand roof, when Paisley Park dragged victory in the Grade 1 Long Walk Hurdle from the fast-closing jaws of defeat in a thrilling finish, coming from a long way back to pip old rival Thyme Hill by a neck.

His heart was evidently fine, but the manner of his success did no good for the blood pressure of his connections and supporters. The meticulous Coleman cursed himself afterwards, but he can laugh about it now.

“I should know better by now,” he says. “I know him so well now that he’s easy for me to ride, but when he hit that flat spot we got a bit squeezed out. It meant we had a lot of ground to make up, but going to the last flight he started running down the leaders and I knew we had a good chance of getting there. He pricked those massive ears and went to work.

“Thyme Hill is probably the best horse he’s faced, but he’s so genuine and tough and stays so well that he got the job done. That’s what very good horses do.”

Lavelle agrees, pointing out that Paisley Park is blessedly versatile in regard to the way a race is run and to the ground conditions, adding the caveat that he’d nevertheless prefer a sounder surface than the mudbath of Ascot, and stressing that although he’s an out-and-out stayer, he’s by no means a slow horse.

Poker player

“He’s a funny horse sometimes. Barry [Fenton, Lavelle’s husband] reckons if he was human he’d be an amazing poker player, he doesn’t give much away.

“Barry can drop him right in at home, cantering away at the back of the group, but the moment he picks him up he’s there, like flipping a switch. And he’s not, definitely not a slow stayer. When he works with a two-and-a-half-mile hurdler the other horse can’t lay up with him. He’s got speed, you know.”

Not only was Paisley Park an inspired purchase for €60,000 through bloodstock agent Gerry Hogan at the Goffs Land Rover National Hunt Sale in June 2015, with three Grade 1s on his roll of honour and almost half a million in prize money in the bag, but he has served as a game-changer for both Lavelle and Coleman. He has been an important horse in their lives and careers, that ‘one good horse’ all those in racing speak wistfully about while accepting that it may not come along at all.

For trainer and jockey – and owner, of course – the one good horse came along at the perfect time.

He made his debut the year after Lavelle, 47, had moved to Bonita Stables, the former base of Peter Makin, when she was in need of a standard-bearer to hallmark the new venture.

“He’s done so much for us, just when we needed a horse like him, along he came.”

She might be taking the words out of Coleman’s mouth. The Corkman, 32, had been an obvious talent and a free-flowing source of winners for more than a decade, but he hadn’t made that vital Grade 1 breakthrough until he teamed up with Paisley Park. Now he has five top-level notches on his belt, with Put The Kettle On and Epatante chipping in and the potential for plenty more, but he remembers where it all began.

“He’s been a very special horse for me, it’s been a fantastic journey together since we started off in a handicap hurdle at Aintree, off a mark of 140,” he says.

“He’s so talented, such a cool horse to be involved with, a real pleasure to ride. I feel fortunate to be associated with him, especially as there’s the whole romantic story around him, so many different angles with the owner and the trainer and his public following. It all adds up to a great tale, a great horse.”

Overpowers

The story continues, everyone flipping madly through the pages to get to the good bit, the Cheltenham Festival. There is, though, an educated school of thought that reckons the Festival overpowers the rest of the season, that big races in their own right are tagged as simply prep races for Cheltenham, and Lavelle can see both sides of the coin.

“It can be a bit of a drag when you train a winner in September and immediately people are talking about the betting for one of the novice hurdles at the Festival. But Cheltenham does create an ongoing interest, an exciting prospect to build on through the season.

“And a lot of racecourses are making their own mini-festivals, there’s Newbury in November, Kempton in December, the Dublin Racing Festival at Leopardstown – when these happen it’s important to be supportive of them.

“If there’s good prize money it will draw people in, but at the same time the Cheltenham Festival is the Mecca for everyone, to have a winner there is extraordinary. I’ve managed it three times and I feel so lucky.”

Should three become four in March that feeling would intensify, although the overriding emotion will no doubt be one of dislocation at what will be the strangest Cheltenham in history, with no crowds, no great yearning roar of expectation, no joyful reception for the winners. Victory this year will feel very different.

“Day in day out, racing has kept going through Covid, but the atmosphere at race meetings has been soulless, although we’ve all just got on with it,” says Lavelle. “But to see Cheltenham without people will be really sad, we’ll all feel it more there than anywhere else.

“Normally, when you walk into the winner’s enclosure the noise makes the hairs on the back of the neck stand up. Personally, it’ll feel like a very strange, slightly empty occasion. No-one even knows whether the Irish will be there in strength this time. We need everyone there, we need all the best horses there.”

With the presence of Paisley Park, one of the best horses will certainly be there, although the task facing him is of historic dimensions. In the four championship races at the Festival, only two horses have regained the crown in the Champion Hurdle, only three in the Champion Chase, just one in the Gold Cup and just two in the modern Stayers’ Hurdle. It is so much harder to win something back once it has been lost.

Yet the feeling persists that if any horse can, it’s this huge-eared, big-hearted, public-hero poker player of a horse. Does Paisley Park have another ace up his sleeve? ?

‘He’s very dear to my heart’

HE is busy, but he doesn’t mind stopping what he’s doing to talk about Paisley Park. It isn’t too great an intrusion, considering that he was busy watching the replay of Paisley Park winning at Ascot. Andrew Gemmell is not just an owner, he’s a fan.

“Don’t worry, you’re not interrupting, I love talking about him. He’s very dear to my heart,” he says, pressing pause on the DVD player.

“I’m living the dream. Owning him has been an amazing experience, unreal. Ascot sent me a recording of the Long Walk and, oh, the drama of that race. I love Simon Holt’s commentary – ‘Paisley Park is storming home . . . Gottim!’. I think I’m wearing the DVD out, you know.”

If you have watched Paisley Park’s races on television you’ll know Gemmell, 68, for he has become a favourite of the broadcasters.

Where some owners look into the camera with a businesslike that’s-nice-my-horse-has-won impassivity, Gemmell is visibly impassioned, his words tumbling over each other in excitement, his face alight. The warmth of his reaction banishes the chill of every wintry racecourse afternoon. He’s always been a fan.

“I remember being 12 or 13, needing something to do during the school holidays, and becoming mad about racing, Sea Bird, Arkle, Lester Piggott. My parents weren’t into racing but one year they took me to York for the three days and it was amazing, just the sound of those galloping horses.”

It is to be remembered that Test cricket-loving, West Ham-supporting Gemmell has been blind since birth, and the resourcefulness he has had to demonstrate in everyday life naturally spilled over into his youthful passion. Come on, we’ve all been there.

Few bets

“I was at boarding school in Shropshire, 16 years old, and of course I wanted to have a few bets, so I had to get some help. Luckily the school janitor liked horses and he came to the rescue, put my bets on for me.”

Gemmell has a stake in eight or nine horses with Emma Lavelle, has a leg in Group 2 winner Trueshan with Alan King, half of the talented chaser Discorama with Paul Nolan, a few shares in flat horses in Australia, which is almost his second home.

He’s a fan who prefers the jumps to the flat, says the old favourites are the thing, talks of Pendil, Bula, Lanzarote, Comedy Of Errors with relish. Now he has a horse whose name doesn’t look totally out of place in that list of equine greats.

“He’s only been out of the first two twice in his life,” he says. “Once when he was still a shell of a horse, he’d been ill after winning his bumper, nearly died, and we all know what happened last year at Cheltenham, when apart from his heart problem he also pulled off two shoes, and still wasn’t beaten that far.

“Can he win it again? Thyme Hill is a very good horse and I don’t know what’ll come from Ireland, but I’m really hopeful, really think he can do it.”

He puts the phone down. Within seconds he’ll be pressing play on the DVD player, both living and reliving the dream.