Twenty years ago Willie Mullins sent his first runner to the Melbourne Cup, one of the biggest flat races in the world. Holy Orders was a talented horse, but his moods had an adolescent leaning, and after he landed in Australia he refused to break into a gallop in his morning paces. In the build-up to the race there is always huge scrutiny on the overseas challengers and in the saturation of coverage Holy Orders turned into a pantomime horse.
In a 23-runner field he finished 17th. Ruby Walsh remembers saying to Mullins what a “disaster” the expedition had been. The trainer insisted on a more nuanced view. “Maybe,” he said, “but we learned a lot.”
Mullins’ profile in the game was different then. Smaller. Digestible. Half-normal. He was acknowledged as one of the leading jumps trainers in Ireland, but he had only been champion once. In the previous season he had slipped to fifth in the trainers championship and he hadn’t trained a winner at the Cheltenham Festival that year.
Sending a horse to the Melbourne Cup, though, with all the time and cost and red tape and logistical challenges that entailed, was a window into his vaulting ambition. Training horses for the flat was just a sideline for Mullins, but the Melbourne Cup was a race for stayers with speed, and in his yard were jumps horses who could be prepared for that test.
So, he kept coming back. Not every year, but when he believed he had something suitable. How close has he come? Fourth. Third. Second. In the early hours of Tuesday morning Mullins will saddle two runners in the race, and one of them, Vauban, is the short-priced favourite.
If Vauban wins, though, it won’t be reported as a sensation. In Mullins’ career the threshold for sensation has shifted so many times in the last 10 years that it is hard to know what it would take to make our jaws drop now.
Some of the numbers that have accrued next to his name would have been stunning at the time. And then those numbers would have been eclipsed by something else. In 2015 he trained 32 Grade One winners, and we must have been astonished then. Two years ago he trained 10 winners at the Cheltenham Festival, and everyone understood immediately that his dominance of that meeting was now beyond the wildest dreams of anybody else.
Tom Dreaper’s record of nine successive jumps trainers titles in Ireland had stood for decades; Mullins is currently at 15 in-a-row. Are you still counting? Seven years ago, Gordon Elliott forced the title race to the last week of the jumps season, and equalled Mullins’ record for 193 winners.
A year later Elliott pushed again, this time taking the title race to the last day of the season. In pursuit of the prize money that determines the title winner he amassed a staggering 210 winners; in feverish defence of his title Mullins trained 212 winners.
A year later he became the first trainer in Ireland to win in excess of €6 million in prize money; last season he won more than €7 million, training 237 winners in the process. Each of Mullins’ sky-scraping numbers was taller than the last, a kind of statistical Manhattan, until it became a ridiculous norm.
In search of ways to describe Mullins’ uniqueness, though, numbers are handy and numbers are dumb. In sport, “genius” is the word we use to describe people we don’t understand. It’s a comfortable cop-out.
That mystery is not a function of distance. In conversation over the years the people who work closest with Mullins have confessed their ignorance too. At close range, they see everything Mullins does, without seeing everything he sees. David Casey and Ruby Walsh and Mullins’ son Patrick can tell you exactly how the horses are prepared, but it would be pointless for any other trainer to plagiarise their methods and hope for the same outcomes.
In other yards, said Patrick, you will find modern training aids: heart monitors, treadmills, swimming pools. That’s not how they roll. “But every year,” said Patrick, “something changes. He’s not afraid to change things. It’s all very intuitive.”
Could Mullins explain his intuition? Or share it? Or teach it? Probably not. Definitely not. No.
He has a capacity for attracting staggeringly resourceful owners and keeping most of them happy. That has nothing to do with horsemanship but without that talent he couldn’t run his business. Harold Kirk has been his chief talent scout for more than 25 years and Pierre Boulard has been his boots on the ground in France for more than 15 years and in the building of an empire, their recruitment of young stock has been spectacular. The business model is open to everyone’s understanding.
But turning some of those horses into champions, and turning most of them into winners, doing it on a scale that nobody had ever imagined before, involved something indefinable in Mullins. Training racehorses sounds simple when trainers talk about it in layman’s language, but if it was so simple there wouldn’t be such hierarchies on the trainer’s table.
The part of Mullins we sometimes overlook is his competitiveness. In team sports you cannot miss it, and even amongst Mullins’ peers their emotions sometimes get the better of them and they can’t conceal how much they want to win. Mullins, though, is not like that at the racecourse. His perfect manners and his even mood and his ready smile are not corroded by the dirty business of winning. The competitiveness is left for us to infer.
Seven years ago, Michael O’Leary’s Gigginstown operation removed 60 horses from his yard in a falling-out over training fees. In the dispersal of those horses Elliott and Henry de Bromhead were the biggest beneficiaries and people wondered if the balance of power was about to shift.
“It would have been very simple for Willie to sit back and keep going with what was left,” Patrick said. “He’d been champion trainer, he’d been leading trainer at Cheltenham, he was in his 60s. Instead, he went out and got more owners; he got more horses; he built more barns. He doubled down.”
Earlier this year, Gigginstown returned to the Mullins yard. They’re in a results business too. Mullins is the rainmaker.
Be under no illusion: it will be astonishing if he trains the winner of the Melbourne Cup. Make room for that feeling.
