Andrew Gemmell, the owner who has been blind since birth, got his cherished Festival winner 46 years after his first visit when Paisley Park carried his colours to win the Stayers’ Hurdle.

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“I can’t believe it’s happened, it’s brilliant. It’s a joke! Just a joke. I’m in tears. It’s fantastic,” said Gemmell as he was surrounded by well-wishers and led towards the winner’s enclosure.

Paisley Park was sent off a well-supported favourite and there was little doubt where the crowd’s sympathy lay at the turn for home as he raced alongside Faugheen in the pink and green colours of Rich Ricci. Would it be a first victory after years of trying for Gemmell or another trophy for Ricci, the executive chairman of a bookmaking firm that closed last week to great ill-feeling among its former customers?

Faugheen’s stamina ebbed, leaving the final challenge to Sam Spinner, a disappointing favourite in this race last year and forgotten at 33-1 this time. Joe Colliver, Sam Spinner’s jockey, makes life hard for himself and had to postpone a drink-driving court hearing in order to be racing, but he delivered a fine ride and came up short by only a couple of lengths.

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“I hope it’s the first of many. Let’s keep coming back,” said Gemmell, who has not allowed his disability to get in the way of what seems to have been a richly rewarding life, which lately includes attending major sports events around the world. Such records are not kept but it seems a fair bet he is the first Festival owner to have spent time on a picket line during the miners’ strike, at which time he was a union official based in Westminster.

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“If the will of the people was anything to go by, this horse was just going to win,” said Paisley Park’s trainer, Emma Lavelle. “I cannot say quite how bad our hangover is going to be in the morning.

“The weird thing is, I felt calm until the race was about to jump off and then I thought I was going to burst into tears. You just feel those fairytales don’t always happen. The most emotional I’ve been today was when Frodon and Bryony [Frost] won and I was like: ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing.’ And then: ‘Oh no! She’s stolen the fairytale!’ But now we’ve got a chunk of it, so it’s OK.”

The winning jockey was Aidan Coleman, enjoying his first success here in a decade, and he used the moment to pay tribute to his friend Campbell Gillies, who drowned at the age of 21, three months after winning here in 2012. “The first thing I thought about when I crossed the line was him,” Coleman said, “because he was a great friend of mine and we miss him every day.”