Foley acknowledges the debt he owes to the Liverpool vets, but said: “It was also the horse’s own determination. As a patient in hospital, he was steady and sensible, which helped the bone to heal. But the minute he came back here and started walking out, he knew he was going back towards racing, and he stopped thinking about his leg. With another horse, the memory of pain would always be at the back of his mind. But when Danoli gets on a racetrack, he forgets he has any legs at all.

He becomes all heart.”The feelings for Danoli are in no small part due to the affection and regard in which silver-haired Foley, with his gentle and gentlemanly ways, is held in the local and wider community. Now 50, he switched to horse training only 10 years ago after half-a-lifetime working the family land, 62 sloping acres overlooked by the towering escarpment of the Blackstairs Mountains. Like farming, the horses are eight-days-a-week toil, but the achievements are more visible and the rewards are sweeter.Foley started with seven horses; Danoli is now one of 32 at Aughabeg (there is a waiting list) and has helped pay for a new training strip and some extra stabling amid the higgledy-piggledy converted stock sheds and barns. The place is very much a family business, small and loyal; Foley’s wife Goretti acts as long-stop and Adrienne and Sharon, the two eldest of their four children, ride out each day. Danoli will be escorted to Cheltenham by the veteran travelling lad Jim Treacey, whose son Tommy has kept the ride in the face of more fashionable offers.The stable star, smallish for a chaser, is a slightly angular, short- backed individual with a wispy tail, one white hind foot and a few white hairs sprinkled on his upper lip and forehead. He may have caught Foley’s shrewd blue eyes, but Stubbs would probably have passed him by. His precious front limbs are protected by padded wraps, but he is not otherwise singled out for special treatment.

Everyone takes a turn at seeing to his daily toilet, including his trainer, and when he travelled to Jim Bolger’s last Wednesday for a spin on the grass, it was not in a luxury horsebox but in a two-horse trailer pulled by the family car, loaded tacked up like a kid’s pony off to a gymkhana and displaying much the same cheerful enthusiasm.”He knows something is up,” said Foley. “Don’t ask me how; perhaps horses feel the seasons, like birds, or perhaps it’s all the extra attention from visitors that he associates with the big meeting. It will be his fourth visit there, after all.”In his six outings over fences, Danoli has been Jekyll or Hyde, with four wins and two falls. It is asking a huge amount for a horse to win the championship in his first season over fences; the last to do so was another Irish horse, Captain Christy, in 1974, but Foley reasoned: “We are entitled to be there We’ll go and enjoy ourselves and if we win, grand.

It would be some moment to be there, because he has as many fans in England as Ireland – he’s gone over the national boundaries. But if we get beat, we get beat, and no long faces, for we know he’ll go down fighting.”Foley softly repeats his favourite phrase “That’s the way it is”, to explain or accept most situations as the pressure of responsibility for a public idol builds towards the big day in 11 days time. He added: “We never thought for a moment that we’d have a horse like this. People are in this business for a lifetime and don’t have one like him But the man above decided he should be with us. And we’ll let Him decide what happens at Cheltenham.”Gold standard: The Irish in the Cheltenham Gold Cup1925 Ballinode, “the Sligo mare”, wins the second running under Ted Leader, beating the odds-on favourite Alcazar in a canter by five lengths.1946 Prince Regent, one of the first Irish chasing idols, wins the first post-war running at the age of 11.