One look, however, was all the light Walsh needed to read the x-ray.

"I knew he'd broken his leg, " he says. "I said it to the lad I was with and he said, 'Ah, you never know. Maybe he'll be alright.' But I knew alright.

You can tell by someone's reaction. It's the same with jockeys.

You can usually tell when they're out for the rest of the day's racing and when they're going to be able to grit their teeth and get back up again for the next one."

When Riverboatman sent him packing two from home at Gowran Park on 26 January, he didn't get back up again for the next one until yesterday at Fairyhouse. That's 38 days' racing drip-dripping away like a leaky tap, each one the same but the next more annoying than the last. Throw in the few weeks he missed before Christmas with his shoulder dislocated and you're inching towards 60. Sixty winter days out of the saddle.

Eight weeks or so for workaday folk, the equivalent of a sixmonth stretch behind bars for a jockey.

The worst of it is that there's been nothing he's been able to do to speed the whole show up. Rest, rest and more rest was the prescription and the doc said if he found that tiresome, well, the best thing for it would be to rest some more. For most sportsmen, the closest they come to a rest is when the cue's just too short to reach the white at the right angle and Walsh is little different. This hasn't exactly been how he'd have chosen to put down his days.

"I wouldn't be a great man to be injured. I wouldn't be a manic depressive or anything like that but I'd be a bit restless about the place alright. With this sort of injury, all you can do is rest up. It would be different if I was getting a lot of physio on it or if there was loads for me to do to fix it.

"But all I've been able to do is a bit of swimming in the mornings. Then in the afternoons I'd watch the racing just to keep an eye on what's going on and sure by then it's evening. I have a great fiancee who's been a huge help.

There's times I like being on my own all the same. You just get through it, I suppose. It takes time and the days can be long the odd time but it's part of what we do."

There's a woeful American football film with Keanu Reeves in it from a few years ago called The Replacements which is utterly unremarkable save for the immortal line, "Chicks dig scars. Glory lasts forever." Were it not for the fiancee, Walsh's scars would guarantee a long queue.

Name a bone, he's broken it. Probably twice.

Jockeys don't strain ligaments or pull muscles. They break bones, dislocate joints, crush vertebrae. Glory would want to last forever.

This last injury is the worst he's had for a long time.

Although it was the fall at Gowran that left him laid up, its genesis was actually to be found in a New Year's Day tumble at Cheltenham. Travelling okay on Sporazene, he was thrown off and had nowhere to go but head-first towards the ground. The stuffing was knocked out of him.

The stuffing, the cranberries, the pinenuts and the wild mushrooms. Everything.

"I actually got quite a fright that day. Like, I'm used to getting winded, it happens all the time. I'd got winded in the race before that one now that I think of it. But this was different, this was bordering on suffocation. I could not get a breath. It was as if someone was standing on my windpipe.

For a half an hour afterwards, I was trying as best I could to get a breath and all I could take into me were tiny little sips of air. The pain in my chest was awful.

"I went to hospital in Cheltenham and they could find nothing wrong when they xrayed my chest. From what I know now, it was probably my fault. I had a pain under my shoulder alright but it was nothing compared to the pain I had in my chest. So, of course, thinking I knew my own body better than they would, I presumed the pain in my back would go away. It turned out to be the cause of the pain in my chest. I compressed the E7 vertebra and whatever nerve that touched on, it meant the pain came up in my chest."

He rested up a while before going back and all was well until the fall at Gowran. It wasn't an especially crashing one but he landed on his back and the pain appeared in his chest again, enough to send him to Kilkenny for another xray. While there, he happened to mention a slight pain just under his shoulder to the radiographer. The root of the problem showed up on x-ray and he was soon in Waterford having a brace fitted. That was at the end of January. The brace only came off last Monday.

A pain, then, in every sense.

This is what's sometimes hard to grasp for the rest of us deskbound sloths. When they test the reflexes of lab rats, they find that the normal reaction to pain is usually a shying away from whatever it is caused that pain. There are some dumb animals in the world but few are dumb enough to keep putting themselves in harm's way like that.

There's been no evidence so far, however, to suggest that lab rats understand the concept of glory.

"I wouldn't change this life for diamonds, " Walsh declares when asked if he gets tired of all the knocks. "Not for diamonds. You get injured . . . it's part and parcel of the sport. If you told me I couldn't ride at Cheltenham, I'd be devastated. Ask any jockey and they'll tell you that the first question they'll ever ask a doctor is how long. How long till I can ride again? This is what we're here for."

So when he was told that he'd be back in time for Cheltenham, it put his mind at rest.

Since then, he's watched an awful lot of racing on television, always keeping an eye out, always afraid he'll miss something in the way a horse sticks his neck out (or doesn't) coming to the line. Naturally, he's had to watch the rides he's missing out on as well, part homework, part torture session.

"It's funny sitting at home watching them. It's a complete contradiction. I'm sitting there hoping that they'll win, wanting them to win to show they're good enough and then being disappointed when they do because I'm not riding them. I was watching Kauto Star there and beforehand I was just hoping that he'd show what a class horse he is and that he'll be ready for a Champion Chase. And then when he won, I was bit down in the dumps because I hadn't been on him."

He's laughing now at the thought of it. "Or when Hedgehunter was coming to the last in the Hennessy, I was getting excited thinking that there's a chance he could be a Gold Cup horse. And then when he won I was thinking, 'F**k it, there's another Hennessy gone.' It's a contradiction that's hard to explain."

Perhaps, but easy enough to understand all the same. Listening for the cheers beats handing them out. Despite having had only three weeks' racing in three months behind him, Walsh will still go into the festival the general 5/2 favourite to be leading jockey, like he was in 2004. When he won it that time, he got a free trip to La Manga for his efforts. He never went. Sure, where would he find the time?

Too many cheers to chase for that.

This will be his eighth festival and he's still utterly beguiled by it. The week is as much a part of him as the hip he'll likely have to get replaced one day and the scar by his left eye that Accordion Etoile was nice enough to present him with. Like some golfers try and do when the majors come around, some jockeys let on outwardly that it's just another week. Not Walsh, not by any stretch.

"To me Cheltenham could never be just another week.

You try and ride every race like it's just another race but I don't think you can treat the week like it's just run of the mill. I know I couldn't anyway. It's the highlight of my year every year. If every week was just another week, there'd be nothing to look forward to."

Still, surely by now, someone of his stature and experienced is immune to it all?

"Ah, God no, not at all. The excitement of it is huge and jockeys feel it every bit as much as the rest of the people do. When you're going out in front of 50,000 people, you know there's 50,000 there.

There's not 50,000 at any other race meeting and trust me, they make a lot of noise.

Even though you're concentrating on your horse, you can tell the difference between the roar of a 50,000 crowd and a 20,000 one.

"When you're there just before two o'clock on that Tuesday and you come out for the first race, you head up past the stands at the top of the straight and then come back down. When you make that turn and come back down the straight, the place is just alive.

"And then you get down to the line and you're looking around, you're checking which horses are maybe sweating a bit, which are boiling over, which of the fancied ones has the atmosphere maybe got to.

The buzz is unbelievable by that stage. And I don't care who you are, that feeling takes a hold of you. You can see it by the way we all line up for the first race - they come charging from the start. You wouldn't have that if it was just another race meeting."

Yet for all that, he still approaches the week with a certain level of serenity. He's always been sanguine about the talent he has and insists on pointing out the part luck has to play in his success. It was there, he says, when Papillon won the Grand National for him and his dad after he'd been out for six months with a broken leg and it was there when both Willie Mullins and Paul Nicholls took such a shine to him that they agreed to share his services between them. Press him on it and he writes jockeyship off as little more than strapping in and holding on.

"You can go to Cheltenham and be as calm as you want and take it in your stride and do all the right things. But if you're only riding the third best horse in the race on the day, you're not going to win.

Like, you could get the perfect start, jump great, get the run of the race but if your horse isn't good enough going up the hill there's not a thing you can do about it. It's like an athlete taking two seconds off his personal best . . . it's great for him but if his personal best is still a second behind the fella in front of him, he just won't win if the fella in front runs his race.

"All I can do is not make any mistakes on the horse's back. But there's so much that's beyond my control. The horse still has to be trained to the minute and he has to run to his potential on the day.

From there, if he's the best horse and he runs his race, then all I can do to influence him is make him lose. I can make a mistake on the best horse and make him come second but there's nothing I can do to the second-best horse to make him win. It's all about the horse. You have to have the best one.

"Maybe once in 20 races the jockey could make a difference but even then, at Cheltenham, it's less than that again. You look at how many close finishes there are at Cheltenham . . . it's very few.

Most races are won by over a length. A jockey can't make that up, the horse has to. For me to make up the difference of a length, the fella in front of me has to make a mistake.

Simple as that."

You can't help thinking that that level of serenity, that knowledge that there are so many outside factors he knows he can't control is the making and breaking of him.

If he worried about injuries, if he beat himself up too much about what he could do to get his horses home, he might never saddle up again . . . or at least not with the same results.

Instead, he meets all imposters just the same.

Seems to suits him just fine.