Who is the only trainer to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup, Champion Hurdle and Champion Chase in the same season?

Known as the “Olympics of horse racing”, the Cheltenham Festival, staged annually at Prestbury Park, on the outskirts of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, every March, represents the biggest four days of the National Hunt season. A total of 28 races, seven on each day, includes championship races in every discipline, the four most prestigious of which are, in chronological order, the Chanpion Hurdle, the Queen Mother Champion Chase, the Stayers’ Hurdle and the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

The Champion Hurdle, Champion Chase and Cheltenham Gold Cup have co-existed, in their current guises, since 1959 but, until 2021, no trainer had saddled the winner of all three “feature” races at the same Cheltenham Festival. Of course, that was until Henry de Bromhead, who is based in Knockeen, Co. Waterford, enjoyed not so much an annus mirabilis as a mensis mirabilis, between March 16 and April 10, 2021.

At the Cheltenham Festival, de Bromhead won the Champion Hurdle with Honeysuckle, ridden by Rachael Blackmore, the Champion Chase with Put The Kettle On, ridden by Aidan Coleman, and the Cheltenham Gold Cup with Minella Indo, ridden by Jack Kennedy. He just missed out on becoming leading trainer, for the first time, when the final race of the 2021 Cheltenham Festival, the

Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys’ Handicap Hurdle, went the way of Galopin Des Champs, trained by Willie Mullins. Three weeks and four days later, though, de Bromhead saddled Minella Times and Balko Des Flos to fill the first two places in the Grand National at Aintree. In so doing, he became just the second trainer, after William Costello in 1908, to send out a 1-2 in the celebrated steeplechase.