Valuable €2m Dublin Racing Festival could turn out to be a Willie Mullins show like never before

After Rangers were put in administration and banished to the bottom of the league in 2012, comedian and Celtic fan Kevin Bridges noted the implications for Glasgow’s traditional two-horse race: “Scottish football has become showjumping.” Willie Mullins won’t enjoy a solo at this weekend’s Dublin Racing Festival. But there might be times when it feels like it.

Irish racing’s Old Firm won’t be the same in Leopardstown. Gordon Elliott chose to skip tomorrow’s Paddy Power Gold Cup with his top horse Gerri Colombe. But he has had no say in how some of his best young hopefuls miss out due to owners Andrew and Gemma Brown’s decision to leave racing and sell their horses in Tattersalls on Monday.

Elliott will try to buy the best of them for the future. But in the here and now he has admitted to being short for this weekend’s action. With Henry De Bromhead in comparative team-building mode, the festival that establishes Ireland’s pecking order for Cheltenham looks more like an open goal for Mullins than ever before.

Such presumption has a way of blowing up in one’s face but it’s tough to argue the sport’s most preeminent figure hasn’t the capacity to dominate €2 million worth of top-quality action to an unprecedented level.

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Of the 15 races up for grabs, eight are Grade One’s. Mullins has had the ante-post favourite for all bar one of them. Barry Connell’s Marine Nationale is the exception in tomorrow’s Arkle. Otherwise, Sunday’s Dublin Chase is the most glaring example of how the biggest threats to a Mullins favourite appear to be other Mullins runners.

It proved so at last year’s festival where the champion trainer won eight races overall. That included a 1,739/1 five-timer on the Sunday. It brought his tally to 38 winners in the festival’s six-year existence. Half a dozen of his 2023 haul came at the top level but only Galopin Des Champs (Gold Cup) and State Man (Champion Hurdle) were the stable’s number one hope.

Nevertheless, the potential for those heady standards to be surpassed this weekend are obvious. Stable form could hardly be better. Mullins notched 40 winners for the month of January alone. With just over five weeks to Cheltenham, the sport’s most powerful yard is hitting its stride with a vengeance.

There is a genuinely awesome element to how a single figure has transformed things over the last decade. Through ambition, imagination and ultimately results, Mullins has become a sporting phenomenon, on the back of which that amorphous entity known as Irish racing has enjoyed unparalleled success.

The corollary of such a concentration of firepower is stamped all over the run-up to a shop window event like the Dublin Racing Festival. Now in its seventh year, it was designed as a jumping version of flat racing’s Irish Champions Festival. Bulging attendances last year testify to how its public appeal has outstripped the original model.

That Irish Champions Weekend prototype conjured predictions of it turning into little more than a home-ground benefit for Aidan O’Brien and the Coolmore operation backing him. Those fears have mostly proved unfounded. O’Brien has been successful but not to an overwhelming extent, due largely to meaningful international competition as well as home rivals raising their game.

Perhaps the perfect example was 2016′s Irish Champion Stakes where a pair of Ballydoyle champions in Found and Minding had to give best to French star Almanzor. Other top-notchers such as Harzand and New Bay were further back.

Such an international element is almost entirely absent from the Dublin Racing Festival. La Bague Au Roi was a rare British-trained winner in 2019 and remains the festival’s sole cross-channel trained Grade One winner. Jump racing’s lopsided balance of power, with Irish-based horses overwhelmingly dominant, means raids from across the Irish Sea have become rarer than Mullins’s missteps.

Even with Elliott and De Bromhead running on full throttle, the Mullins team has always been the one to beat at a festival that for all its appeal is still at heart a lucrative set of Cheltenham trials. It’s why Nicky Henderson only half-jokingly labelled it “Willie’s benefit show”. The depth of excellence on show could hardly be bettered. But the overwhelming majority is on one side.

Last year’s results underline how that doesn’t mean predictability about which horse passes the post first. Differing ownerships mean suspicions about team tactics are mostly for the birds. But there’s no contradiction in pointing that out and how it isn’t competitively healthy when one team gets so overwhelmingly on top. Predictability is a turn-off no matter what the arena.

Handing out faults in such a scenario is a futile exercise, although a Government review into how prizemoney ends up in comparatively few hands might pay interest to how the weekend spoils get divided up. Nevertheless, the ingredients look to be in place for that to be a more one-sided exercise than ever before.

Should it unfold like that it will be an achievement to be lauded in the here and now. But in the longer term, it isn’t just Scottish football that has found to its cost how overarching superiority reduces wider public appeal.

Something for the Weekend

Willie Mullins’s weekend priority is the Grade One’s but FINE MARGIN (3.00) is an intriguing handicap candidate tomorrow. His first run for the yard saw him run into Slate Lane at Haydock in November where no less than Crambo was behind him in third. A literal reading of that might be misleading. But a mark of 127 could be lenient.

A Dream To Share will be all the rage to follow up his 2023 success in Saturday’s finale although REDEMPTION DAY (4.40) has race fitness on his side and put in a noteworthy effort here over Christmas when running far too rank for his own good.