Michael O’Leary doesn’t lose many battles of will, but the Ryanair boss appears to have blinked first when sending a couple of horses to be trained by Willie Mullins.
It’s six years since the man who has been champion National Hunt trainer for the last 13 seasons, and rewritten the record-book in the process, decided to increase his fees.
O’Leary famously reacted like one of his customers being told their bag is too big to carry on: he removed his 60 horses from Mullins, saying he wasn’t paying.
In the interim, O’Leary has downsized his Gigginstown Stud operation and is rarely seen racing anymore. For his part, Mullins’s grip on the jumping game has if anything got even tighter, including a record 10 Cheltenham festival winners in March.
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Last month, while the eyes of the racing world were trained on elite flat action at Champions Weekend, it emerged the link has been re-established.
“No one fell out. I always remained very friendly with Eddie [O’Leary] and Michael and all the family. Someone mooted sending some horses back and I said no problem. It was very simple. There were no great meetings or anything,” Mullins explained on Wednesday.
And O’Leary’s paying full whack? – “All my owners are treated the same.”
The tone is impeccably neutral and leaves little doubt about the depth of competitiveness behind the urbanity. The bad news for Mullins’s rivals is it is matched by an unrivalled depth of talent in his stable.
On Wednesday, Horse Racing Ireland had a winter season launch date at the Co Carlow base that houses stars such as the Gold Cup favourite Galopin Des Champs and unbeaten bumper champion Facile Vega.
Mullins has saddled 81 winners and won over a million in prize money already in the 2022-23 campaign. But with the flat winding up next week, and the weather turning grim, focus increases on the return of the winter game’s stars.
One who won’t be appearing is The Nice Guy, the unbeaten winner at Cheltenham and Punchestown in the spring, who is out for the season through injury. With the tempo increasing in their homework, anticipation comes laced with worry.
“The next month can be head-wrecking. We get a lot of joy later in the season, but this is also the most disappointing time I think, putting the horses through their paces; the lucky ones will get through and probably race before Christmas. But there’s going to be disappointment,” Mullins said.
“I’m looking at all these gorgeous horses out there and knowing by December we’ll have another five or six horses that are out for the season and that is so disappointing,” he added.
Even in such a power-packed operation fingers are kept crossed extra tightly that some horses in particular don’t fall by the wayside.
Despite never having run over three miles over fences, Mullins believes Galopin Des Champs “looks the part” for the Gold Cup and described Facile Vega as the most exciting prospect he’s had in years. Where they emerge is unclear with fingers also crossed for proper soft winter going sooner rather than later.
The digits of various racing officials will be crossed too that renewed focus on the jumps encourages more fans to go racing. In the wake of Covid, there has been a 10 per cent drop in attendances but National Hunt has always been a popular prospect and Grade One action resumes next week.
“I hope we see an upswing but a lot of the early season races, particularly at Punchestown, the Morgiana meeting, they don’t seem to gather people together for some reason. Its nearly Christmas before you get lots of people at race meetings,” Mullins considered.
As to how to attract more people, he added: “The one thing I don’t like about racing at the moment is the 35-minute gap between races.
“It’s bad enough in jump racing, but in flat racing, you can only go for so many cups of tea between races and it makes the day very long and unappealing for customers. Racing needs to sharpen itself up and have a bit of a buzz going.
“I find now, if I’m going racing and I have a runner in the first and the last, I’ll probably just go to the last rather than hanging around all day. It’s the same for regular racegoers.
“To me, that’s one key thing about getting people back in the gate into racing; quicker action, more action, and I think racecourses need to see that. It can be very long and if things get too long, they get too boring. Tighten things up and make it more entertaining for the regular racegoers.
“That extra five minutes, I don’t think it’s good for racing. I’d be an advocate of tightening it up [but] I know that brings us on to who runs the show!” he added.
That reference to the gambling industry’s timing demands is linked to news of SIS and RMG in negotiations with HRI on a new media rights deal up to 2029.
It leaves the prospect of day-to-day coverage of Irish racing continuing to be behind a paywall on Racing TV when the sport is struggling for public profile.
“From what I can gather, the actual percentage of people watching racing on their own TV at home is a very small part of the whole package. That’s the way it’s been explained to me, that getting racing on terrestrial TV and on their phones is far more important.
“So, I have to believe what I’m told and hope that it’s a better package for people in the industry in general,” Mullins concluded.
