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No I'm a good-news man is his standard response to bad tidings

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"No, I'm a good-news man" is his standard response to bad tidings. Last week, though extra security has already been summoned, Waites set up her caravan outside the box of the Gold Cup favourite. She will stay there every night until the race just as she did two years ago, with her dogs for company. One night back then, she was woken up by a voice outside calling "Come on, boy". No one was there, but she swears to this day that it was Fulke Walwyn.If there are demons in the air, Chance has yet to meet them. When Mr Mulligan ran in the SunAlliance at Cheltenham in 1996, his first full season as a private trainer in England, he could barely buckle up the saddle because of nerves. Michael Worcester, the horse's owner who brought Chance over to train in Lambourn, was even worse "How that saddle stayed on, I don't know," Chance laughs.

"Suddenly, this was serious stuff, we had the great white hope for the SunAlliance and I hadn't been there before." Mr Mulligan, a lumbering, diesel-engined giant of a horse, finished second that day, but galloped the opposition into the ground in winning the Gold Cup under Tony McCoy the following year, a result widely regarded as a "fluke". A lingering sense of injustice still hovers over the yard, not a bad motivational force on cold mornings.On the wall of Chance's office there is a framed cutting of a newspaper article the morning after Looks Like Trouble won the SunAlliance Chase. "Concern for fallen favourite casts a shadow," the headline read. Well, yes, there was understandable concern for the fate of the Irish-trained Nick Dundee, the hot favourite who was badly injured in a fall three fences out. But Chance believes to this day that his horse would have won that race anyway and reckons Trouble's victory in the Gold Cup the following year proved his claim. A substandard Gold Cup, countered the critics, who also were less convinced about the worth of the champion's victorious return to action after injury at Wincanton earlier this year.

Yet it was some feat of training to get the horse back on to the racecourse, let alone back to a fair imitation of his old self. It will not seem that way on the day, but if Trouble reaches the tape on 14 March in prime condition, victory or defeat is essentially irrelevant. The hard work, the nights of fretting and the hour and a half Waites spends each day, washing down, blow-drying and bandaging those delicate forelegs, will have been worth the effort."We nearly expect it now, this last bit with the run-up to Cheltenham," Chance says. "We've got to the stage when we'd be disappointed if he didn't win. I have to catch myself and say, 'Hang on, let's get there first, let's tone the whole thing down'. If he stays in one piece, he'll get there, if he doesn't, he won't.

We've always felt that if we can get him to Cheltenham raring to go, it will take a good horse to beat him." Reality, though, has not stopped him from playing out the race a thousand times in his mind.On Wednesday morning, as racing digested the news of the Jockey Club's drug tests on five yards, the stable star was sauntering up the Lambourn gallops in front of television crews from the BBC and French Channel 4. To an outsider's eye, he looked supreme, almost arrogant in his work. For Waites, who relinquishes the morning ride to no one except perhaps Richard Johnson, his Gold Cup jockey, and John Francome, the former champion and Channel 4 analyst, this is the best part of the day Chance counts down another morning without mishap. A long time ago, an agent in Ireland who had a nice horse to place, said: "Sorry, Noel, I can't help you here. This one's got to go to a good trainer." He meant one of the big trainers on the Curragh; the perception was that big meant good. Chance, with 45 horses in his yard and more at the gate, is big enough now. With two Gold Cups in the cupboard and another in the offing, the question of quality has already become academic.Biography: Noel ChanceBorn: 18 December, 1951, Dublin.Educated: St Patrick's High School, Downpatrick.Family: Wife, Mary; daughters, Fiona, 18, and Eimear, 16.Career: 1967, worked for Sir Hugh Nugent; 1971, moved to Australia to work for Neville Begg in Sydney; 1974, returned to Ireland to train on the Curragh; 1995, came to Folly House Stables, Lambourn, as private trainer for Michael Worcester; 1999, set up as public trainer at Saxon House, Lambourn.Biggest wins: Mr Mulligan (Reynoldstown Chase 1996; Gold Cup 1997); Looks Like Trouble (Sun Alliance Chase 1999; Gold Cup 2000; John Bull Chase 2001); Flagship Uberalles (Tingle Creek Chase, 2000).Career winners in England: 80..

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