After last year’s crowd-free Festival, what a joy to have Cheltenham back in the proper style, and equine stars like Constitution Hill, Honeysuckle and Shishkin to cheer on this week. But, with all due respect to the class of ’22, all of them have a long, long way to go before they might achieve the legendary status of the 1989 Gold Cup winner. His story is told in Desert Orchid: The Nation’s Grey on ITV4 on Monday and one can think of no better way to get in the Cheltenham mood.

The hour-long documentary is part of the ‘Against The Odds’ strand on ITV4 that features stories of glory grown from unpromising soil. As Desert Orchid’s owner Richard Burridge says of the young Dessie: “He looked like he had been put together by committee and the experts were disapproving and said he should be got rid of.” 

Or as his regular jockey Simon Sherwood had it: “He came from a very moderate mare and an unfashionable stallion.” A very eighties tale of social mobility, then.

Fortunately, they did not get rid of him and Desert Orchid, in the alchemic way that great sporting stories sometimes have, found a trainer who was ideally simpatico for him. David Elsworth was prepared to run Dessie, and felt that he would rather campaign the horse than train him at home. He and Desert Orchid never ducked a challenge. 

Part of the reason for the horse’s celebrity was that the public could see him run a lot, taking on his rivals, and one of the reasons perhaps that we may not see his like again is that some of today’s big owners and trainers are much more cautious in the number of runs they will give their stable stars.

All of Dessie’s great qualities are well covered in this documentary, which gathers together the main players in his story. The distinctive, instantly recognisable colouring didn’t hurt, of course. He was brave, he would take a race on from the front and he was a Higgins, a Ballesteros, not a Faldo or a Davis: he would take risks and, sometimes, he would fail and fall. 

Sherwood says that ahead of getting the ride on Dessie in his first King George: “My Christmas lunch was a bit less digestible because the horse was a tearaway and he did hit the deck from time to time.” And all the more thrilling the journey was for it.

His versatility was another rare trait: in his Gold Cup-winning season, he won the Tingle Creek over two miles, stepped up to three to win the King George, and then switched back to two miles in arguably his greatest performance, giving 22 pounds to the top-class Panto Prince to win the Victor Chandler at Ascot. 

Elsworth says that Dessie did not find Cheltenham much to his taste, because he was a much better horse going right-handed. But on a snowy, bitter slog of a day in March 1989 he added the biggest prize in jump-racing to his CV when he beat Yahoo by a length and a half to win the Gold Cup.

Sherwood says of that triumph: “When he went past the winning post, his ears went up and you could see him looking around saying ‘look at me, this is what I am’. He adored the crowd.” And the crowd adored him. His groom Janice Coyle says: “he was feisty, he didn’t suffer fools gladly, he didn’t like to be taken on by other horses. He knew the Gold Cup was a big occasion and it fired him up.” 

All sports need their stars and, Tiger Roll aside, it is fair to say that there are some vacancies in jumps racing. It would be fantastic this week if Shishkin, say, lights it up. But, as this enjoyable film demonstrates, there will never be another Dessie.

Against The Odds: Desert Orchid – The Nation’s Grey (Mon, 9pm, ITV4)