The wizard who trained the 'biggest certainty to ever set foot at Cheltenham'

Festival Legends: Martin Pipe

Membership of the Festival Legends club is not an easy thing to come by, and Martin Pipe had to work hard to gain entry.

Perhaps he wouldn't have got in if his credentials had extended merely to his pair of Champion Hurdle wins, courtesy of Granville Again in 1993 and the electric novice Make A Stand four years later. With Messrs Scudamore and McCoy on board, the duo represent the two defining eras of Pipe's career and help chart the great trainer's ascent to racing's highest peaks – but in isolation they weren't membership clinchers.

Maybe the committee were titillated by MCP's first festival success, courtesy of Baron Blakeney, whose 66-1 eclipse of David 'The Duke' Nicholson's hot favourite Broadsword in the 1981 Triumph Hurdle was a very early sign of things to come. Sadly we had to wait another eight years for the Wizard of Wellington to confirm his growing threat to racing's establishment, when he took both the Supreme and the Ballymore (or their prehistoric equivalents) with Sondrio and Sayfar's Lad, but that double opened the floodgates.