Comeback king who had grown men crying on the Cheltenham lawns

This is a resolutely objective and level-headed project and there's no place for sentiment within its parameters. Even so, surely it can't hurt to revisit that afternoon in March 2016 when Sprinter Sacre won his second Queen Mother Champion Chase, the grandstand roof lifted briefly off its moorings and grown men cried on the lawns.

Grown men crying on lawns isn't the stuff of scientific analysis, of course, no matter how big the sample size, but Cheltenham crowds aren't known for their mawkish tendencies and it takes something genuinely special to move them to tears, so perhaps it wouldn’t be wise to dismiss their emotions too lightly.

What set them off was the return to something like top form of one of the most exciting and gifted two-mile chasers ever to set foot on a racecourse. He may still have been a stone shy of his majestic peak, but even that level of performance was enough to land the biggest prize in the game, by an emphatic three and a half lengths from the admirable Un De Sceaux and eight others.