THE names speak not only of the way we were, but also of the way we will never be again.

Danoli. Norton’s Coin. Winnie The Witch. Flakey Dove. Ikdam. These are the ghosts of Cheltenham past, sent to show us what we’re missing in the present.

There is no room for romance in modern elite professional sport. It’s inevitably more about business, really, less about sport, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the major corporations have metaphorically moved in and muscled out the interesting little shops that used to line the high street.

It’s a world of marginal gains, of the relentless and expensive pursuit of perfection, of a clinical - if not cynical - attempt to corner the market in probabilities. That’s how it goes in top-level competition, and our own little branch of that, which blossoms so memorably with the riotous rite of spring at Cheltenham, is no exception.

Flat racing has always been a business, underwritten by stallion values. We know not to go looking for romance there. But for a long, long time, jump racing was a sport. There were big-hitters, naturally, but there was room in the ring for everyone to throw a punch. Not any more. Not at the top level.

‘Danoli days are gone’

Empirical evidence of that comes straight from these pages. Just last week this newspaper’s sister publication the Irish Farmers Journal wanted a Cheltenham article, one focusing on a handful of Irish runners at the meeting with a farming connection. That request was met with a rueful shake of the head and the words ‘the Danoli days are gone’.

Gone but not forgotten. Sure, how could they ever be? The five names at the top of the page all won at Cheltenham between 1989 and 1994, before three days of sport were slowly and surely replaced by four days of business. They need little explanation, but memory lane is always a fine place to get some exercise.

Ikdam won the Triumph Hurdle for trainer Richard Holder, a farmer from Bristol whose racing interests grew into a full-time job, but he was a farmer at heart. The irreducible Norton’s Coin, Gold Cup winner at 100/1, was trained by Sirrell Griffiths, who famously milked his 70 cows before leaving for the races.

“In Ireland I can be walking down the street and it doesn’t matter where it is, someone will come up to me,” said Griffiths years later, quoted in Richard Austen’s fascinating book At The Festival.

Ken Bridgwater often went through a season with no winners at all but he won the County Hurdle with Winnie The Witch; Flakey Dove won a Champion Hurdle for Herefordshire farmer Richard Price, who was hard at work in the lambing shed as his great day dawned. And then there’s Danoli.

Ireland’s icon was trained in a yard no visitor could ever find by Tom Foley, who farmed the Carlow fields he grew up in and had a priest bless his horse before every race. Those backwoods roots, allied to his mighty talent, made Danoli a folk hero, arguably the last of the true down-home folk heroes.

He went to Cheltenham for the Sun Alliance Novices’ Hurdle (Gallagher/Baring Bingham) in 1994 as the Irish banker, and such was the energy that surrounded him you could practically feel him coming from the top of the hill. He brushed aside the final hurdle like a thirsty man throwing wide a tavern door and surged to glory amid a deafening reception.

It was 30 years ago this spring, and the Danoli days are gone. The victory of the Paddy Neville-trained The Real Whacker in last year’s Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase was a faint echo of those times, but it was quickly lost deep in the mix of the same old song. Power has become concentrated in too few hands, and should another Danoli emerge from the corner of some far-off farmyard it would be a very different story. He would, without fear of contradiction, be sold for big money to one of the mega-trainers before he even saw a racecourse.

Business model

“More and more Irish trainers have changed their business model,” says this paper’s editor Mark Costello. “They buy store horses, run them in point-to-points and, if they perform well, present them on the altar of the boutique sales for a handsome reward.

“It would be commercial suicide for those trainers to run their horses in bumpers or hurdles, where they could be beaten out of sight by runners from the top yards. Better to sell the potential, often to owners and trainers in Britain where the racing is less competitive.”

The words ‘better to sell the potential’ tell the whole sorry story, serve as an epitaph for jump racing as a sport, as a mission statement for jump racing as a business. For it’s not just selling the potential, of course. It’s selling the soul. And while potential comes around time after time on a conveyor belt, soul is a one-time thing. Give it away, and it’s gone for good.

Does it matter? After all, if we can still marvel at the exploits of the best horses, does it matter for whom they run and win? The answer to that question is that we have always seen the best horses at Cheltenham, but once upon a time we also saw something else.

When a Welsh dairyman is stopped in the street by a total stranger because his horse won a big race decades before, or when an Irish farmer comes to embody the spirit of the nation because of the derring-do deeds of his horse, there is magic at work. Jump racing used to cast that spell on a regular basis, but now we see the same old tricks again and again and again and the illusion was shattered years ago.

So if the ghost of Cheltenham future makes a timely visit this weekend, standing like an ectoplasmic one-man preview night at the foot of the bed, the picture he draws will be a familiar one. Big business all the way as usual - Mullins, Elliott and de Bromhead, backed up by Henderson, Nicholls and Skelton.

Perhaps you might ask him where the heirs of Tom Foley are, of Sirrell Griffiths, of others like them. But we already know the answer to that one.