THE first day of school is always the most memorable. Nobody ever gets asked about how the third Monday of second year went.

First of September is the memorable day. Everyone wishes you well. It’s a huge deal. These days maybe the school entrants even get sent a few video messages. Day one is key. This isn’t the first day at school for the RTÉ crew, they are a well-settled team, but the opening montage felt fresh as Galway was wished a happy birthday.

Six years from the passing of Colm Murray, he featured among the many contributors. It was a nice touch to set up the piece. Lots of big names from the world of sport sent video messages wishing Galway a happy 150th birthday. It was a quality idea, nicely executed. At over four minutes long though, the viewer began to feel the years passing!

Robert Hall is such a lovely wordsmith – “horses and humans bring each other together” was how he opened his link to Walsh senior and junior beside him for the afternoon.

The father-son dynamic is intriguing but also in stark contrast. Ted is the machine gun, Ruby the sniper. Ted’s stories contain many details most self-corrected sentence by sentence. It was two days or three days back then, it’s six or seven days now. Although it actually doesn’t matter, because it’s the way he tells them.

Ruby spoke about Galway as a thinking jockey’s track with a real insight on how to ride there depending on the pace. All the detail one could ever need packed into about four sentences. Great, unless you are Robert Hall who is looking for about three minutes worth of chat. Over to Ted who seems to think that there are class horses and Galway horses and Denman and Kauto and Ansar and it’s unclear what point he is trying to make. Who can keep up at this stage before Ruby eventually stops him, a merciful assassin!

All still full of energy, all on message, Galway is great. Plenty of idiosyncrasies but great.

Over to the betting ring “the stock exchange” as Brian Gleeson loves to call it. Clearly not the heart of the course of old, in “the good old days”, given the volume of online betting liquidity but important nonetheless. There is one consistency of the betting ring though that has survived the entire era of televised racing almost with any evident elf evolution. The gormless goon.

Gormless zombies

Yes, despite the efforts of generations of production assistants, a lifetime of being told to “behave” and “grow up” by John McCririck, the betting ring’s gormless goon is still apparently thrives. Brian soldiered away despite being surrounded by the gormless zombies on his shoulders.

It’s unclear why Ireland’s Call was blaring out before the first race, this is not rugby country for another couple of weeks. In stark contrast to leaden-legged betting ring growls was the smart Sean Flanagan taking to the air. Noel Meade’s stable jockey has a pilot’s licence and took Ted for a spin. Ted wondered if there were similarities between a horse and a plane (ask your son, he rode Kauto!).

The piece stimulated an interesting chat on the transition for sportsmen beyond life in the saddle or on the pitch. Leading to a shout out to John Cullen, now a cameraman who Ruby noted was “an animal to lose weight” and you never got up his inside.

Everyone got up Jody Townend’s inside in the GPT but it didn’t matter a jot as Willie won it again. The rider was the story of the evening and given her recovery from injury in what sound like nasty circumstances on the biggest stage, deservedly so. It’s Galway, it’s great!