Cheltenham Festival: The potential headliners at this year’s Festival

Actually, to be fair, when talking about leading Cheltenham Gold Cup fancy Presenting Percy, there isn’t so much mystery about the horse – owned by Philip Reynolds, son of the former Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds.

Victories in two Festival races, the 2017 Pertemps Handicap Hurdle and the RSA Chase of 2018, have made sure of that.

It’s his trainer Pat Kelly who’s rather more cryptic.

Not only does he go about his business with an almost Trappist-like silence, making little contact and declining all interviews, but it’s said that only a few know the exact location in County Galway of his tiny operation – and the eight-year-old Presenting Percy’s jockey Davy Russell is not one of them.

Various theories abound for the reticence of Kelly, who also won the Pertemps Hurdle in 2016 with Mall Dini, but as he doesn’t talk it’s hard to come up with a definitive answer.

What is clear, however, is that he has a good relationship with the racecourse at Galway City, which is a right-handed track because officials there switched around their fences to emulate left-handed Cheltenham so that Presenting Percy, who’s only run once this season and that was a win over hurdles, could get some match practice.

Plenty of the thousands of visitors from Ireland – they account for 30% of ticket sales – are shouting the odds about Presenting Percy’s prospects. Not, however, his trainer.