Features / Dan Fitch / 23 February 2011 /

Dan Fitch looks at the horses that defied the odds to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

As the most prestigious event of the National Hunt calendar, the Cheltenham Gold Cup is the Grade 1 race that can make or break the reputation of a horse.

With the race contested by the very top horses around, it is no wonder that it is most often won by one of the favourites. Occasionally though, an unfancied entrant has upset the odds to win the race.

Here are five rank outsiders who won the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

5. Cool Ground - 1992 Gold Cup Winner - 25/1

Carvill's Hill was expected to win the 1992 Gold Cup at Cheltenham, but was overtaken in the final moments of the race, as Cool Ground won the race by a short-head, with The Fellow just beaten into second and Docklands Express a close third.

Trained by Tony Balding, Cool Ground had started the day as a 40/1 outsider, before being backed in to a 25/1 starting price. The Gold Cup win proved to be the pinnacle of Cool Ground's achievements, as the horse failed to win another race for another three years.

4. Cool Dawn - 1998 Gold Cup Winner - 25/1

When the amateur rider Dido Harding bought Cool Dawn for £7000 in 1993, she had no greater ambition for the horse, than to ride it in ladies' point-to-point races.

Just five years later, Cool Dawn had progressed to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup.Trained by Robert Alner and ridden by Andrew Thornton, the 25/1 outsider led the race from start to finish and saw off a late challenge for Strong Promise, to surprise the Cheltenham crowd.

3. Gay Donald - 1955 Gold Cup Winner - 33/1

Tony Grantham was the first royal jump jockey, but he was riding for the owner Philip Burt rather than the Queen Mother, when Gay Donald won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1955.

The 33/1 long-shot won the race by some distance, beating the 1954 Gold Winner Four Ten into a distant second place.

2. L'Escargot - 1970 Gold Cup Winner - 33/1

L'Escargot may have come into the 1970 Cheltenham Gold Cup as a 33/1 outsider, but his name is now forever etched into the racing history books. Unlike some of the other long-priced winners of the Gold Cup, L'Escargot's victory in 1970 wasn't a one-off, freak result, swiftly followed by a descent back into obscurity.

Trained by Dan Moore and ridden by Tommy Carberry, L'Escargot would win the Gold Cup again in 1971 and beat Red Rum to win the Grand National in 1975. Along with Golden Miller, L'Escargot remains the only horse to have won both the Gold Cup and the National.

1. Norton's Coin - 1990 Gold Cup Winner - 100/1

The biggest ever rank outsider to win the Gold Cup was Norton's Coin in 1990. If it wasn't enough that Norton's Coin started the race as a 100/1 afterthought, he did so by beating a field that included the legendary Desert Orchid, who was the odds-on favourite.

Norton's Coin was only entered in the Gold Cup because his owner had missed the deadline for a lesser value handicap race at the Cheltenham festival. Sirrell Griffiths, who also trained the horse, only set off for Cheltenham on the morning of the race, after milking the cows on his farm in West Wales. Little did he know that his horse would hold off a challenge from Dessie and Toby Tobias to clinch an unlikely victory.

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