With a circuit of Cheltenham still to run here on Friday Willie Mullins’s hopes of filling the infuriating, Gold Cup-shaped hole in his record-breaking career at the Festival were hanging by a thread. Three of his four runners in this season’s race, the latest of more than two dozen Mullins had sent to the start over the years, were already out of the running. Kemboy, the best of them according to the betting, got no further than the first.

Having saddled the runner-up no fewer than six times, Mullins feared the worst. But when he trained his binoculars to Al Boum Photo, the last member of his squad still standing, he quickly realised that 2019 might finally be his year after all.

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“With three of them out before the first circuit had finished I was just thinking, another year of disappointment,” the trainer said afterwards. “But looking at the field, every time I came to Paul [Townend], I realised he was so well-balanced on the horse, with a loose rein and the horse just going along in a rhythm, fence by fence. I thought, we have a life here.”

There was still a good deal of ground to cover. Native River, last year’s front-running winner, was at the head of the field once again and apparently still full of running. Clan Des Obeaux, the King George winner, was hugging the rail under Harry Cobden and tracking the leaders going well, while Presenting Percy, the favourite, was still close enough to make an impression if he could find his Festival-winning form from 12 months ago.

Yet Al Boum Photo, unraced since winning at tiny Tramore on New Year’s Day, was going best of all. “About the fourth or fifth last he needed a jump,” Mullins said. “You could see a long stride coming and Paul asked for it, and he got it. I thought, wow, there’s plenty of petrol left in his tank. And I know Paul’s body language, so I knew he hadn’t at all gone for anything and he still thought he had plenty left.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Willie Mullins and jockey Paul Townend with the Gold Cup. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

There was so much left that Al Boum Photo hit the front turning in and quickly opened a useful lead. Native River dropped away while Clan Des Obeaux could find no more inside the final quarter-mile and another Irish-trained runner, Anibale Fly, was the only danger at the last. He stayed on strongly up the hill but, while the gap was slowly closing, Al Boum Photo had more than enough left to get home by two and a half lengths.

“He met the last perfectly and I looked up at winning post and what was behind,” Mullins said. “I knew that 99 times out of 100 he was going to make it this year.”

He did, and two decades of disappointment and frustration for Mullins melted away in a moment. His first runner in the race, Florida Pearl, was the 5-2 favourite in 1999 but finished only third. A year later he was the first of the trainer’s famous half-dozen runners-up while in 2014 the agony was played out over the course of a 15-minute stewards’ inquiry after On His Own was short-headed by Lord Windermere, who had impeded the second on the run-in. The stewards, in what must have been a marginal decision, allowed the result to stand. Mullins, ever the sportsman, did not press the owners to appeal.

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Better by far to savour the moment, if or when it finally arrived, and this success was a testament, too, to Mullins’s loyalty to his jockey. Townend and Al Boum Photo were involved in a bizarre incident at Punchestown last spring where horse and jockey suddenly veered off at the final fence with a Grade One race seemingly at their mercy. There was never any question, however, that Townend, the long-standing number two to Ruby Walsh at the stable, would keep the ride.

“The early [Gold Cups] were probably disappointing but you get used to it,” Mullins said. “I had probably resigned myself to never winning a Gold Cup, so I didn’t really obsess about it or get too disappointed about it. Racing has been very good to me. I have a fantastic life in racing and I resigned myself to thinking, ‘If I never win, so be it.’ You only get one chance to win it each year and, when three of them were gone, I thought it was another year like that and so I probably had all my disappointment out of me early in the race.”

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The one sadness in the race for Mullins was that Invitation Only, a faller approaching halfway, suffered a fatal injury. Bellshill, whom the trainer expected before the race to “take a lot of beating”, was pulled up but uninjured, while Kemboy unseated Danny Mullins, the trainer’s nephew.

Al Boum Photo’s victory came 33 years after Dawn Run, trained by Mullins’s father Paddy, recorded one of the most famous Gold Cup victories of all. “I didn’t get home for three or four days after that,” Mullins said. “It might take a bit longer this time.”