Captain Guinness is toast of town after El Fabiolo flop

But Blackmore's shock win in Champion Chase only delays Mullins’ 100th festival victory

- Greg Wood

There have been afternoons at the Cheltenham festival in recent years when it seemed that Willie Mullins had found a way to banish the abiding air of uncertainty that had always been the meeting's motif in earlier times. Within the first 90 seconds of the Queen Mother Champion Chase yesterday, however, the script had been read and then rejected as far too predictable, as El Fabiolo, the 2-9 favourite, was pulled up with well over a mile still to run, leaving in tatters countless bets on a Mullins treble in the day's Grade One events.

Captain Guinness and Rachael Blackmore, who finished nearly 15 lengths behind El Fabiolo last month at Leopardstown, were the pairing to take advantage, finishing one-and-a-half lengths in front of Gentleman De Mee, a stable companion of the odds-on favourite.

But the story of the race was as much about the horse that failed to win, as until the moment when El Fabiolo lost his hind legs at the fifth fence Mullins's afternoon was unfolding entirely according to plan.