Champagne moment for Ruby Walsh after a front-running exhibition from the festival master

Greatest Festival Rides - No. 9
Ruby Walsh (Champagne Fever, 2013 Supreme Novices' Hurdle)

If there's a reliable definition of a 'great' ride, then surely it has to be that the rider involved has won a race he or she really shouldn't have won. The horse has to play its part, of course, but the rider has to have made the difference between victory and defeat.

So it is that, while Ruby Walsh has won more races than any other jockey in Cheltenham Festival history and dazzled on the biggest stage on so many occasions, he won’t appear in this list (spoiler alert) as often as contemporaries Tony McCoy and Paul Carberry. More often than not, by virtue of his role as stable jockey to Paul Nicholls and then Willie Mullins, he was on the best horse in the race.