If betting odds offer an overview of the likelihood of an outcome occurring, Norton’s Coin really didn’t stand a chance in the Gold Cup at the 1990 Cheltenham Festival.
At a price of 100/1, the bookies were offering an implied probability of just 1% that Sirrell Griffiths’ horse would be able to beat the best in the business; who at the time included the iconic Desert Orchid.
But what unfolded is arguably the greatest underdog story in horse racing, as a Welsh dairy farmer masterminded one of the sport’s most unthinkable underdog stories.
Coining It In
Norton’s Coin was trained in Nantgaredig, Carmarthenshire in Wales by dairy farmer Sirrell Griffiths
The 1990 Gold Cup was supposed to go the way of Desert Orchid.
Despite his grey colouring, Desert Orchid was the golden child of the race-going public; the horse that even the most casual observers of the sport knew of.
Dessie, as he was fondly known, had won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1989, to go with four victories in the King George VI Chase, the Aintree Bowl, the Tingle Creek Chase and a stack of other Grade 1 triumphs. David Elsworth’s horse was, understandably, sent off as the 10/11 favourite for the 1990 Gold Cup.
He had plenty of decent competition from the likes of Toby Tobias and Bonanza Boy, who won 15 races in an illustrious staying career that included two Welsh Grand Nationals.
As for Norton’s Coin, he wasn’t even meant to be running in the Gold Cup…
Griffiths had made something of an administrative error, forgetting to enter his horse into a lower-grade handicap chase at the meeting before the deadline.
“I was angry with myself for days as he would have had a nice weight in the handicap and a really good chance,” he recalled.
However, Griffiths had – speculatively – made an entry into the Gold Cup earlier in the season, and so had no choice but to send his boy out against the best three-milers in the business.
On the Friday morning of the Cheltenham Festival, it was business as usual for Griffiths, who milked his cows and tended to his herd on his farm in Wales personally driving Norton’s Coin, in a single trailer, all the way to Cheltenham himself.
It was a far cry from the slick operations run by the likes of Jenny Pitman and Martin Pipe, but Griffiths was very much a hobbyist when it came to training racehorses… after all, it wasn’t his main source of income.
Graham McCourt, in the saddle of Norton’s Coin, sat the outsider at the back of the field in the early going of the Gold Cup. But by the second circuit of the Prestbury Park track, he had moved forward into a group just behind Desert Orchid.
Two from home, Dessie began to tire and Ten of Spades fell, leaving Norton’s Coin and Toby Tobias deadlocked at the front. They both jumped the last safely and dug in up the long closing stretch at Cheltenham.
Incredibly, it was Norton’s Coin that would stay on more doggedly than the 10/1 Toby Tobias, taking the line a length clear in the fastest Gold Cup in nearly 40 years.
Cheltenham Gold Cup 1990 Full Result
| Pos. | Horse | Odds | Trainer | Jockey |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Norton’s Coin | 100/1 | Sirrel Griffiths | Graham McCourt |
| 2nd | Toby Tobias | 8/1 | Jenny Pitman | Mark Pitman |
| 3rd | Desert Orchid | 10/11 F | David Elsworth | Richard Dunwoody |
| 4th | Cavvies Clown | 10/1 | David Elsworth | Graham Bradley |
| 5th | Pegwell Bay | 20/1 | Tim Forster | Brendan Powell |
| 6th | Maid Of Money | 25/1 | John Fowler | Anthony Powell |
| 7th | Yahoo | 40/1 | John Edwards | Tom Morgan |
| 8th | Bonanza Boy | 15/2 | Martin Pipe | Peter Scudamore |
| Fell | Ten of Spades | 20/1 | Fulke Walwyn | Kevin Mooney |
| PU | The Bakewell Boy | 200/1 | Richard Frost | Steve Smith-Eccles |
| Fell | Kildimo | 50/1 | Toby Balding | Jimmy Frost |
| PU | Nick the Brief | 10/1 | John Upson | Martin Lynch |
Afterwards, the horse was paraded in the winner’s enclosure and Griffiths was presented with the trophy by the Queen Mother. There was a sense of stunned silence as the dust settled on the most incredible scenes in Gold Cup history.
In 1990, dairy farmer Sirrell Griffiths enters his horse Norton’s Coin into the Cheltenham Gold Cup – by mistake.
The result would go down in history!🆕Legends of Welsh Sport: Norton’s Coin
📺 Tonight, 9.30pm – BBC One Wales pic.twitter.com/sIzMjFL1U0— BBC Wales 🏴 (@BBCWales) February 16, 2022
Changing Times
It would be great to think that we haven’t seen the last of the 100/1 winners in the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
However, National Hunt racing has changed beyond all recognition in recent years, with the leading Irish trainers such as Willie Mullins – the 1/5 favourite to be crowned Cheltenham’s leading trainer in 2025, Gordon Elliott and Henry De Bromhead developing their ‘super yards’ and a conveyor belt of Grade 1 winners.
The Gold Cup is still the pinnacle of the Cheltenham Festival, but with prize money increasing in all of the meeting’s other races, trainers and connections are perhaps more likely to swerve the showpiece renewal and instead try their luck in another lucrative chase or handicap race.
So valuable are the big festivals – Cheltenham, Aintree, Leopardstown etc – today that horses are trained and prepped specifically with these major paydays in mind. The winners at the Cheltenham Festival have often been signposted already, thanks to a lighter workload and prior graded success that season.
At the 2024 edition of the meeting, ten of the 28 races were won by favourites – many of them odds-on with the bookies, while the longest priced winner was 33/1 chance Stellar Story in the Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle.
As for the Gold Cup itself, four of the last five editions have been won by the betting favourite, with Lord Windermere’s triumph in 2014 as a 20/1 outsider the longest odds victory in the race since the dawn of the new millennium.
Cheltenham Gold Cup Winners Between 2013 and 2024
| Year | Horse | Odds | Trainer | Jockey |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Galopin Des Champs | 10/11 F | Willie Mullins | Paul Townend |
| 2023 | Galopin Des Champs | 7/5 F | Willie Mullins | Paul Townend |
| 2022 | A Plus Tard | 3/1 F | Henry de Bromhead | Rachael Blackmore |
| 2021 | Minella Indo | 9/1 | Henry de Bromhead | Jack Kennedy |
| 2020 | Al Boum Photo | 10/3 F | Willie Mullins | Paul Townend |
| 2019 | Al Boum Photo | 12/1 | Willie Mullins | Paul Townend |
| 2018 | Native River | 5/1 | Colin Tizzard | Richard Johnson |
| 2017 | Sizing John | 7/1 | Jessica Harrington | Robbie Power |
| 2016 | Don Cossack | 9/4 F | Gordon Elliott | Bryan Cooper |
| 2015 | Coneygree | 7/1 | Mark Bradstock | Nico de Boinville |
| 2014 | Lord Windermere | 20/1 | Jim Culloty | Davy Russell |
| 2013 | Bobs Worth | 11/4 F | Nicky Henderson | Barry Geraghty |
Sadly, it’s almost impossible to imagine a 100/1 chance winning the Cheltenham Gold Cup now… but at least the remarkable underdog story of Norton’s Coin and Sirrell Griffiths will forever be embedded in National Hunt racing’s hall of fame.