Paul Nicholls is a serious man, ambitious, driven, and if ever he has stopped to smell the flowers, he has done so in the privacy of his own garden. He is a trainer to be respected, not one that invites or seeks affection. But let there be no mistaking what we saw unfold in the Cotswolds on Friday afternoon for it was a magnificent feat of horse training and a quite brilliant piece of management.

To enter three horses in the Gold Cup and have them finish first, second and third is immensely impressive but 25 years ago, Michael Dickinson went two better than that. What elevates Nicholls’s achievement was the way he managed the challenge of two star horses that needed different tactics and owners who had to believe their horses were fairly treated. This was no simple task because the starting point was a conflict of interest: by doing everything he could to ensure that Denman might win the Gold Cup, Nicholls had to make tactical decisions that lessened Kauto Star’s chances of winning a second consecutive Gold Cup. How did he square that with Clive Smith, Kauto Star’s owner? To Nicholls, the equine dilemmas would have been simpler than their human equivalents.

There were subtleties for which there were no easy solutions. Denman is owned by Paul Barber and Harry Findlay, and because it was Barber who set up Nicholls as a trainer on his farm at Ditcheat in Somerset, their relationship is usually close. At one level, Barber is landlord and Nicholls is tenant. At another, it is personal and the older man, Barber, has clearly had an almost paternal influence on Nicholls’s career.

It would be hard to be another owner in Nicholls’s yard and not fear that however high you figured in the trainer’s pecking order, you would still find yourself beneath Barber. Smith once had his team of horses trained by Martin Pipe but switched to Nicholls partly because he felt Pipe’s first allegiance would always be to his biggest owner, David Johnson. Nicholls is a clever man and saw the potential for conflict once Denman asserted himself as a genuine challenger to Kauto Star’s position of eminence. From that point, Nicholls has played the most thoughtful game.

Plotting alternative paths to the Gold Cup for his two famous chasers was not difficult and he ensured both had the kind of confidence-boosting victories horses need before a big race. Once it became clear both would be in the Gold Cup, Nicholls’s intelligence became more apparent by the day.

The first decision was which horse the stable’s No 1 jockey Ruby Walsh would ride. Given the importance of that decision, the easy thing for the trainer was to stay neutral, but he suggested to Walsh that he should stick with Kauto Star, the horse who gave him his first Gold Cup winner. Walsh would almost certainly have chosen to partner Kauto Star in any case, but it would have been reassuring for the horse’s owner to know the trainer agreed with the jockey’s decision.

When asked in January and February how he thought the Gold Cup would unfold, Nicholls offered us endless neutrality. Two great horses, who knows? Then in the final 10 days, there was a shift and he spoke often about his belief in Kauto Star and how he rated him the best horse he had trained.

On the morning of the race, he spoke passionately about his belief in last season’s champion: “I’ve been convinced for well over a year that Kauto Star is not only the best horse I’ve ever had, but the best I am ever likely to train, so I still can’t bring myself to believe the horse in the box next door to him is going to turn out even better than the champion. But I simply don’t know, and that’s the fascinating thing about their epic clash.”

It was almost like he talked up Kauto Star to deflect attention from the fact that he and Denman’s owners were meticulously planning a tactical race to beat the champion. For there is no doubt that is what they did and what they were entitled to do, however hard that was going to be for Smith.

Central to the strategy was Nicholls’s third runner, the sev-en-year-old Neptune Collonges. A good-looking grey, he is a fine chaser who does best in races that play to his boundless stamina. It suits him to set the pace and his role in the Gold Cup was clearly defined, to lead the race through the first circuit and at a pace that would stretch those behind him.

Nicholls does not leave things to chance. Liam Heard, a good but inexperienced jockey, had been expected to ride Neptune Collonges but there was a fear he would go too quick. A few days before the race, the trainer switched to the masterful horseman Mick Fitzgerald, a superb judge of pace. Fitzgerald did his job perfectly and when Sam Thomas and Denman jumped past him at the fence in front of the stands after a circuit, there was a sense of watching a race-plan of military precision unfold in front of you. Thomas gradually wound up the pace and because he is young and brave, he was always going to err on the side of a murderous pace.

And that is what he set. Walsh had not been that comfortable on Kauto Star through the first circuit, although at the pace set by Neptune Collonges, his horse’s jumping was fine. Once Denman got onto the back straight and Thomas increased the tempo, Kauto Star’s jumping disintegrated. He hit the top of one fence, then another, and another – and unless something unforeseen happened, the game was up for the champion.

In his determination to find a chink in Kauto Star’s stamina, Thomas probably asked Denman to do too much too soon but it was not a mistake, rather the exuberance of youth and the jockey’s fear that any lessening of the pace would play into his chief rival’s hands.

There will be many memories from the race, and perhaps the greatest will be of how the two protagonists jumped. Because Denman was racing six to 10 lengths in front of Kauto Star for much of the 3 mile journey, we could watch his jumping and then watch Kauto Star’s. The difference was significant and, in some respects, the surprise lay in the fact that just seven lengths separated the horses at the end.

Another related memory is of Kauto Star’s courage. Denman had taken him to a place he didn’t want to be; a torturous world where your lungs burn and every stride is painful. To be in that place and not give up is praiseworthy, to find the will to chase the winner, as Kauto Star did, was beyond mere admiration. In defeat, the champion raced like a true champion.

Afterwards, those who had believed Kauto Star to be unbeatable struggled for an explanation. The most reassuring was that the horse had an off-day and the proof of that seemed to lie in the evidence of his victory in the Tingle Creek Chase two years ago. How could he struggle with the pace of a Cheltenham Gold Cup when he had proved quick enough to win one of the premier two-mile races?

“I don’t think you can just say he had a bad day,” said one of racing’s most respected assessor’s of performance, Time-form’s Jim McGrath. “This was the slowest ground we have seen at Cheltenham since 1995 and in very tough conditions, Kauto Star’s stamina was found out. Stamina is like a piece of elastic, in that until you stretch it, you don’t know when it’s going to snap.”

That Nicholls and Denman’s owners, Barber and Findlay, had come up with the perfect tactics to expose the champion’s vulnerability was beyond dispute. Soon after the race, in a moment captured on Channel 4’s coverage, Findlay walked up to John Hales, owner of the third-placed Neptune Collonges, and thanked him for his help. One wonders what Clive Smith would have made of that.

But the tactics were beyond reproach. Neptune Collonges had produced by far the best run of his career and the fast pace worked for him as well as Denman. Perhaps the truest explanation of everything that happened is that Nicholls could not see Kauto Star losing the race. He planned a race that would give his second string every chance in the belief that the plan would be irrelevant in the end: that his string was just too good to be outmanoeuvred.

Findlay is a likeable man, a gambler not afraid to lose and with the character to come back from the toughest knocks. He says what is on his mind without always working out the effect on others. After the race, he talked about the impact of defeat on the 2007 champion. “I think that race will have absolutely blown Kauto Star’s head off,” he said.

He might as well have taken a needle to Clive Smith’s eyes.

And Nicholls, the horse trainer and man manager, is left to pick up the pieces. Perhaps the trainer saw it all play out in his mind’s eye in the days before it happened and that is why he got Smith’s other great horse, Master Minded, to produce one of the greatest performances we have ever seen at Cheltenham in the Queen Mother Champion Chase.

You gain a champion, you lose a champion; you are euphoric, you are heartbroken. And you have still got next year.