Features / Dan Fitch / 29 December 2010 /

Dan Fitch looks at the most successful trainers over the history of the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

It may be the jockey and their horse that receive the roar of the Cheltenham crowd when they taste Gold Cup victory, but the trainer is the unheralded hero who puts in the crucial work behind the scenes.

Paul Nicholls has the chance to win a fifth Cheltenham Gold Cup when the 2011 festival takes place, which would see him jointly become the most successful trainer in the history of the race. Here are the five most successful Cheltenham Gold Cup trainers.

5. Basil Briscoe - Four wins with one horse

Perhaps the greatest day of Basil Briscoe's working life was when he persuaded Dorothy Paget to spend £10,000 on two horses.

Those horses were the double Champion Hurdle winner Insurance and Golden Miller, the five-time Cheltenham Gold Cup winner. Briscoe trained Golden Miller to the first four of those wins between 1932 and 1935. Golden Miller also won the Grand National in 1934 and is still the only horse to have won both races in the same year.

Golden Miller failure to win the 1935 Grand National saw Briscoe and Paget fall out, as the pre-race favourite unseated his jockey after refusing a fence. Basil Briscoe was replaced as Golden Miller's trainer by Owen Anthony, who masterminded a fifth successive Gold Cup win for the horse.

4. Vincent O'Brien - Four wins with two horses

In 2003 Vincent O'Brien was voted as the greatest influence on horse racing in history, in a poll by the Racing Post. The voters recognised the achievement of a trainer who tasted success with steeplechasers and in flat racing.

Before turning to the flat, O'Brien won the Grand National in three successive years with three different horses, but his greatest steeplechaser was undoubtedly Cottage Rake, who won the Cheltenham Gold Cup three times between 1948 and 1950.

Cottage Rake was the first horse to retain a Gold Cup since Golden Miller's successes in the thirties. O'Brien won his fourth Gold Cup in 1953, when Knock Hard was victorious and it is almost a certainty that the Irish trainer would have added to his tally had he not made the decision to switch to the flat.

3. Paul Nicholls - Four wins with three horses

The most successful Gold Cup trainer of the modern age is Paul Nicholls, who has trained three different horses to four wins over a period of ten years.

Nicholls won his first Gold Cup in 1999 when See More Business won the race. It was Nicholls' third major win of the festival, as his charges also won the Queen Mother Champion Chase and the Arkle Chase, cementing his reputation as one of jump racing's elite trainers.

It took eight years before Nicholls would win the Gold Cup again, but after his 2007 success with Kauto Star, he would also train Denman to victory in 2008, before Kauto won his second Gold Cup to give Nicholls a third successive win and four in total. With Kauto Star currently leading the betting to win the 2011 Cheltenham Gold Cup, Nicholls clearly has a wonderful opportunity to become the most successful trainer in the history of the race.

2. Fulke Walwyn - Four wins with four horses

No trainer has ever trained more winners at the Cheltenham Festival than the Welshman Fulke Walwyn and he won a total of four Gold Cups with four different horses between 1952 and 1973.

Walwyn first win in 1952 came when Mont Tremblant claimed victory. The trainer would wait a decade for his next Gold Cup win, with Mandarin winning the race in 1962 and Mill House winning a second successive Gold Cup for Walwyn in 1963.

Mill House would go on to almost retain the Gold Cup in 1964, but was narrowly beaten by the great Arkle. Walwyn would clinch his fourth Gold Cup win after another gap of a decade, when The Dikler clinched a final victory for one of jump racing's greatest ever trainers.

1. Tom Dreaper - Five wins with three horses

The trainer who guided Arkle to that 1964 win over Fulke Walwyn's Mill House, was Tom Dreaper. That famous encounter was one of five Gold Cup wins for Dreaper, with three different horses.

His first win came in 1946 when he trained Prince Regent to Gold Cup success. Eighteen years passed until Arkle won the Gold Cup in dramatic fashion in 1964 and the great horse would win again for Dreaper in 1965 and 1966.

Dreaper and jockey Pat Taaffe followed up those three successive wins with Arkle, by teaming up for another Gold Cup victory with Fort Leney. That was the Irish trainer's fifth victory in total over a period of 24 years and no one else has won the Gold Cup so often.

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