Alastair Down: delight for disciples as miracle worker Martin Tate lands monster punt

In this article, first published in the Racing Post in February 2011, Alastair Down recalls a huge Cheltenham Festival gamble executed by trainer Martin Tate, who has died at the age of 99

Okay, you are in Cana for a wedding. It's a bit of a dry old do and you are thinking of leaving to have a bet in the seller at Galilee when some bearded bloke, just turned 30, walks in and turns six stone jars full of water into wine.

Having been a bit of disaster as parties go, it becomes a Group 1 knees-up. Do you waste time asking how the feller did it? You do not. All you say to yourself is: "This guy is definitely different and whatever he gets up to in future I am going to follow him."

It's hard to say at what stage of late childhood/early teens I discovered there was a God. I could see vaguely where Christians were coming from, acknowledged that the prophet probably made a profit, and had a soft spot for Buddha if only because I had a mirror in the bathroom. But like St Paul struck blind yet all-seeing on the road to Damascus, there came a point when I realised there was only one real miracle worker – Martin Tate.

Through the 1970s and 1980s there was no finer craftsman of the beautifully judged plot than Tate, a cattle man of legend who farms near Kidderminster and on whose point-to point course at Chaddesley Corbett the famous Lady Dudley Cup is run to this day.

There are few things more complex than the planning and execution of a major coup. Some think the principal requirement is low cunning, but they are wrong. It demands a racing brain of the highest intelligence, a secret agent's discretion, a sniper's patience and crates of bottle when it comes to putting the money down. If it can all be done with a huge helping of great good humour and a ready chuckle, then so much the better.

In mid-December 1988, they ran a qualifier for the Coral Golden Hurdle Final, nowadays the Pertemps, at Cheltenham. All the world's allotments and every political assassination in history added together never boasted the number of plots that the Coral Final gave rise to. The qualifier was won by a five-year-old called Garrison Savannah, who was an acute disappointment in later years and only ever managed to win a Gold Cup.

But lurking back in eighth place that afternoon, beaten a worryingly adjacent 19 and a half lengths, was a certain Rogers Princess, trained by M Tate. Ten years earlier Tate had landed a rafter-rattling punt with 11-1 chance Water Colour in the Coral Final and, although his publicity-shy yard was perhaps in gentle decline, he had kept his festival hand in with the likes of Scot Lane, who won the National Hunt Handicap Chase in both 1982 and 1983.

From that December day on I was utterly convinced that Martin was aiming Rogers Princess for one race alone – the Coral Final in March. Rogers Princess, whose dam Ask For Roger had finished third to Water Colour in the 1978 Coral, had a couple more runs over an inadequate 2m6f in December before winning over 3m in January at Worcester in soft ground. By now I could contain my curiosity no longer. I tracked Tate down to Switzerland and he confirmed his mare would run at Cheltenham.

They didn't open ante-post markets as early back then as they do now, but conversations this week with fellow conspirators – former Weekender lead tipster Dick Hunter and that paper's editor Neil Cook – confirmed that we started to smuggle the cash on at 33-1 and kept chugging through 25s, 20s and 16-1. There was no subterfuge with the mare. She went to the festival in the form of her life with her final two runs being a win over 3m and a final mid-February primer when storming home to get chinned a short head over 2m6f.

It was one of those gambles that everyone seemed to catch more easily than a cold and she went off 8-1 joint favourite with Shaun Keightley doing the steering off 10st. Going out into the country the second time round the field split into two groups with Rogers Princess right at the back. But in a matter of strides Keightley attached her easily to the leading bunch and from the top of the hill she was travelling with astonishing ease as, with every inhibition thrown skywards, we began to shout her home from the lawn.

The close-up read "looked well, headway tenth, quickened and led approaching last, comfortably". She scooted up the hill to win by 12 lengths from Henry Mann, who came back and won the Coral under top weight a year later.

Martin is now 87 and in blinding good order. He was just off to follow the hunt when I talked to him this week and he reflected: "She won a seller early on in her career and it was after that I put her by for the Coral. She was tougher than tough and you couldn't have a better horse to go into battle with."

Two years later she was caught by a hurdle swinging back in the Coral and had to be put down. But of all the Cheltenham punts in my life, good, bad or eyewateringly expensive, she is the one remembered with the most affection, not least because of the life-enhancing character who orchestrated her greatest day.

Read this next:

'He had the patience of Stonehenge with horses' - popular Cheltenham Festival gamble trainer Martin Tate dies aged 99 

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