Leading Festival jockey victorious in Champion Hurdle on Hurricane Fly only days after being crushed at Naas
Live coverage of Day Two of the Festival

In the 100-year war between backers and layers here, humans have always competed with horses for top billing. The animals are the story, chiefly, but there was no denying Ruby Walsh his right to the light when he completed his grand slam of National Hunt's racing's biggest prizes on Hurricane Fly in a vintage Champion Hurdle as part of a first-day hat-trick of winners.

Last Wednesday, pictures pinged round the sporting world of Walsh laying under a horse after a fall at Naas. As Tony McCoy's great rival hit the floor a creature called Boro Bee was brought down and decided to use Walsh as a landing mat. In the frame you can just see Ireland's champion rider crushed under an avalanche of horseflesh. In the next shot, another runner gallops over him as if to complete the job.

A cut and blackened eye was the only reminder of that gut-flipping accident as Walsh set off on Hurricane Fly in the two-mile championship for hurdlers. Rupert Walsh (anyone less like a Rupert would be hard to find) is the artiste of the winter piloting game, but you would never know it from his countenance. Lacking John Francome's locks and looks, he is steely-haired and famished. For all his freshness and ingenuity in the saddle he looks like a creaky veteran.

But not when the tapes go up. Walsh has now ridden 30 Festival winners - seven more than McCoy, his closest pursuer. He took the first race of the meeting, the Supreme Novice Hurdle, on Al Ferof, denied Peddlers Cross to win the Champion Hurdle on the 11-4 favourite, then gathered in the David Nicholson Mares' Hurdle on Quevega so easily that he peered between his legs to see where the rest of the field were, Lester Piggott-style.

Walsh exists for these big tests. The bigger the race the more his athleticism, touch and judgment of pace come to the fore. None of this would be possible, though, without the physical courage this meeting has demanded of its players since the Steeplechase Company (Cheltenham) joined forces with the National Hunt Committee to create what came to be known as the Festival, in 1911, 100 years ago.

The first names on the centenary scroll are equine. They have to be, because jockeys and trainers cannot race alone. Who would want to watch vertically challenged men jump fences and run round Prestbury? From Golden Miller, the five-time Gold Cup winner, through to Arkle, Dawn Run, Desert Orchid, Best Mate and Kauto Star, Cheltenham's history has memorialised the four-legged actors.

In Robin Oakley's book – The Cheltenham Festival: A Centenary History – jockeys, trainers and owners also crowd the tale. The annual fiesta was concocted in the local King's Arms pub by a landlord who had ridden a Grand National winner and a trio of drinkers who had also conquered the Aintree fences.

In the 1930s, Cheltenham unveiled the iron men: Fred Rimell, Fulke Walwyn and Frenchie Nicholson, who were to thrive as trainers, and a tradition was born of intrepid jockeyship that found its natural stage on this undulating Cotswold ground.

As Walsh has been leading Festival rider for the past three years (in 2010 and 2008, with just three winners), those who backed him to complete the four-timer will be pretty smug. For him to be here at all is an achievement. Last week's crash at Naas was early in his comeback phase.

Last November at Down Royal, at the meeting where he rode Kauto Star to victory, Walsh broke his leg and was out for four months. The subsequent fall at Naas would have shaken the faith of more fragile men. Instead the big-race harvest goes on. Walsh, 31, is tied into two powerful yards. Hurricane Fly and Quevaga brought success to his Irish base – trainer Willie Mullins – while Al Ferof got the Paul Nicholls stable off the mark for the week. Walsh said: "A lot of people have got me here. I am very grateful to Willie Mullins and Paul Nicholls because they have put me straight back on these horses."

They were hardly likely to keep him waiting on a bench. In the ride he gave Hurricane Fly you could see the influence the finest jockeys exert up the hill, where timing and control determine outcomes. Hurricane Fly's sire, Montjeu, was a top-class Flat racer, who has imparted finishing speed to his hurdling son, but for it to be effective the jockey must apply it at the right moment to nullify the stamina of more traditionally bred jumping horses.

Walsh has always thrived under this kind of pressure. He won the first of his two Grand Nationals on Papillon, trained by his father, Ted, in 2000, has landed Queen Mother Champion Chases on Azertyuiop and Master Minded and claimed two Gold Cups on Kauto Star, his mount in the race on Friday. Hurricane Fly completes the set, less than a week after his rider was hit so heavily from above that the medical staff at Naas might have needed an excavator to recover him from the ground.

On the first day of the centenary meeting, fittingly, Walsh displayed the indomitability of the great National Hunt rider, who plays an attrition game far more perilous than the financial duel between bookmaker and punter, which went the gamblers' way, when Hurricane Fly crossed the line to a heart-thumping roar.