Nicholls, Moore and Connell savour weekend wins before Cheltenham Festival

If there was a way to bottle and sell passion for a particular sport, racing would want Paul Nicholls to have a needle in his arm on a semi-permanent basis, so we could share as widely as possible the depth of feeling we saw from him again on Saturday. 

The ITV cameras caught it as he watched the Imperial Cup from the slopes in front of Sandown's grandstand, shouting encouragement to Iceo and Harry Cobden, then celebrating with a single fist pump as emphatic as anything we've ever seen from a sportsman.

To care that much about your job after 30 years at the coalface is not common. It warms the heart of any jumps fan, as we enter the week that matters most, to see such unaffected emotion and to be reminded that, after all the controversies and bickering, the game at the heart of it all is what really matters.