Jenny Pitman, the first female trainer to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup, will be one of 100 remaining winners at a luncheon to mark the race's 100th anniversary at the racecourse's new Centenary Restaurant on Monday.
Pitman has not attended the meeting since Covid and will host an annual gathering for her former vets at her home this week, including lunch and television viewing as Cheltenham prepares for a major Gold Cup milestone.
Until Pitman won with Burrough Hill Lad in 1984, women's involvement in winning the blue pennant was limited to owners. She led the way among female show jumping trainers, having won the Grand National with Corbiere a year earlier.
"It wasn't that difficult [being the first], there weren't many people," Pitman, 77, recalls in the kitchen of her home in Berkshire, where she will watch this year's festival. "I think women were looked at very differently back then. I didn't want any special favors, just fair play.
"I'll tell you what female trainers miss - maybe not all of them, but a lot - having a wife. Someone who has done everything possible so that you don't have to come home with nothing in the refrigerator to sort out things at home."
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Burrough Hill Lad was as good a hunter in his day as he was in the 1980s.
"He wouldn't have come to me if he hadn't been written off," Pitman recalls. 'My parents knew [owners] Stan and Kath Riley. He only had one clean leg. The rest had been injured in some way. His big problem was that he stood very straight in the front. I wouldn't have bought it.
"The first time I saw him was at the last race Corbiere won at Kempton. About three weeks later I asked his trainer how he was doing and he replied that the horse could not lift his head off the floor.
"I said the only person who might be able to help was Ronnie Longford, a physio. He must have had some other problem because I got a call from my parents saying Stan wanted me to watch him. I wasn't very keen on taking over horses from other trainers. This was a favor to my parents. H
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He came to me because he was a crashed car. You fixed it, something else broke.
"As a young horse he had also fallen off a dike with Stan, which left him with a large scar on his hind leg, where the nerves were very close to the surface.
"If he knocked on it or the weather was wet, it was a nightmare. Because he tried to protect that from the back, it caused him to lose balance in the front. You were always on the wing and praying.
"There wouldn't have been many people who would have spent the time I spent with him, but it was a challenge. My reward was to get him back on the track."
His owner Stan was a character. The horse was by a local stallion who cost 'five bob' because he didn't want to pay for the horse he wanted. He once suggested buying a trailer to reduce transportation costs, and his wife Kath knitted the colors to save on purchasing one. After a celebratory Gold Cup lunch, he even presented winning jockey Phil Tuck with a bill.
"Phil was just brilliant when you talked about a race," Pitman says of the race story. "Brown Chamberlin [runner-up] can be a bit eccentric. We knew he could go wide on the bottom corner. The tactic was nifty: expect Brown to lead Chamberlin down the hill and when he goes wide, nip inside and grab him. Johnny Francome's horse threw away his race.
"Burrough Hill Lad had a devastating foot movement that would beat any five-furlong horse - remember he was sitting next to a sprinter. But it only lasted 50 yards. You could turn the turbo and put it to bed, but then you would have had it. You had to hold on to it.
"The Queen Mother presented the trophy and they said she would like me to come to the Royal Box. I had put on my lucky sweater with a big hole where I had burned it with the iron.
"When we got to the door, the chief said, 'Can I take your coat?' I remembered the hole in the jersey and said, "No, I can't stop for long." He must have thought I stole something because I held the jacket around me so people couldn't see the hole!"
With son Mark at Garrison Savannah, she also had the emotions of a mother and a trainer. 'Garry' also suffered from problems with a shoulder injury in December, which required six weeks of box rest and acupuncture. The owners kept asking if he was definitely running and Pitman replied, "If you see him in the pre-parade ring, he definitely is."
"We hadn't even talked about how to ride him until Mark came out," she said. "I said, 'Ride him the same as Toby Tobias (1990 runner-up), but don't let him beat you this time.' I was shocked at myself. I thought: how can you say that? The horse has not ridden since December and has been in the box for six weeks. To this day I don't know how he won that race. Mark said when he walked onto the track he felt it grow four inches.
"As a mother while your child was driving, I detached myself from the fact that he was my son. I always took my jacket out from under the stairs when I went racing - that was my armor, nothing got through it. He rode it with control and conviction. Finally he asked the horse for everything and it gave him everything. Peter O'Sullevan said: 'The Fellow rises.' I was standing between two women and if we weren't packed into the stands like sardines, I would have collapsed.
"You ask yourself questions when they've had a bad fall and think, 'If I didn't have this job, he wouldn't be in this situation.' If he gets hit again, it will destroy him.
"People said, 'You won, Jenny.' You don't go through Crisp and Red Rum and other close finishes thinking it's in the bag until it's in the bag. I just switched to autopilot. My proudest moment was when Mark and Adam Kondrat (from The Fellow) shook hands without knowing the outcome."
Within two hours her son was in the back of an ambulance on the way to Cheltenham General with a broken pelvis.
"I blame myself," she reflects. "When he worked at the races, I couldn't allow myself to be his mother. After Garry's race he said: 'Do you want me to ride in the final because I'll have to go into the sweatbox?' I said the owners expect you to ride it, and so I do. I couldn't say, 'I'm your mother and here's a big favor for winning the Gold Cup.' If it had been anyone else, I probably would have done it. I regret that."
