The Times

13.03.2026                         

You need to watch it again to believe it. Dawn Run and Jonjo O’Neill walking back after winning the 1986 Gold Cup. It was the happiest madness that any sporting stadium will ever see.

The crowd is a bubbling sea of smiling faces with Dawn Run and Jonjo bobbing around in the midst of it. Jonjo’s arm is nearly being pulled off with the shaking of it. The owner is being hoisted shoulder-height and you wouldn’t be surprised if horse and rider were to follow. It meant so much because it was the crowning of such an intoxicating story and the cast was so wonderfully, improbably, impossibly Irish.

Dawn Run, the big Irish mare, in action much more thundering powerhouse than elegant oil painting. Two seasons earlier she had won the Irish, English and French Champion Hurdles to be rated the best hurdling mare in history. But she’d been off a year and had just three runs over fences, one of them a fall back here at Cheltenham in January.

Owner Charmian Hill, a diminutive 67 yr old grandmother who had bought Dawn Run as a 3-y-o and had actually ridden the first of the mare’s 17 victories. Her doctor husband did a sidebar in magic shows and once had a lady faint in the front row when he sawed someone in half in Tipperary. The couple were no strangers to the unusual.

Trainer Paddy Mullins, the quiet, unassuming genius who had risen to conquer the highest heights in flat racing and jumps from a yard still very similar to his farming roots. “Ah yes,” he said, as he watched Dawn Run rocket round the fields which were then his training grounds, “I think it does the old girl good.” The twinkle in his eye left a neat ambivalence as to whether he was referring to the racehorse of to the little parachute attachment which was Mrs Hill above the saddle.

Then Jonjo, the best loved of all champion jockeys, back among the winners after a fall that  had left his leg in pieces but was now a controversial, owner-insisted replacement for Paddy Mullins’ son Tony who had ridden the mare in all her previous runs over fences.

Jonjo was to make history by recovering from the cancer which, unknown to him, was already on him and moving on to training and a Grand National winner. Jonjo had been aboard when Dawn Run had won the Champion Hurdle in 1984 to be greeted. No horse had ever completed the Champion Hurdle double. All of Ireland was intent on this very un-Orwellian story.

So everything to play for as Dawn Run set off with the pattern soon set. would try and dictate. Little Run And Skip would harry her and King George winner Wayward Lad and last year’s Gold Cup hero Forgive And Forget would stalk them. She pressed on but she couldn’t lose them. At the second last they were four in a line and only a Jonjo special leap, with hands and feet and body and whip kept the big mare in the argument.

At the last Wayward Lad and Forgive And Forget surely had her measure. On the run in Wayward Lad went two lengths clear and while Forgive And Forget weakened, Dawn Run looked leaden hoofed in second.

But then as exhaustion clawed at the leader. Wayward Lad’s lost its bite. Somehow Dawn Run drew inspiration from Jonjo’s energy and as her forelegs stretch Peter O’Sullevan’s voice hit his now so celebrated words: “the mare is getting up.”

Then afterwards, oh afterwards. It shouldn’t happen like this. It could never happen now. That sea of humanity united in the happiness that a horse and rider could bring. Ah yes, the madness of it all.

For both Jonjo and Dawn Run there were unhappy postscripts. For Jonjo, that imminent battle with cancer which would nearly kill him. For Dawn Run, death itself when she broke her neck in a trainer opposed but owner insisted tilt at a second French Champion Hurdle

But nothing, nothing, will ever, can ever, erase the memories of those happily mad moments when Jonjo rode back on the mare that had given him this greatest moment. Yes, a victory beyond the realms of glory.  40 years ago today.