In 2006, around the time that everyone thought Willie Mullins was a very good trainer, definitely one of the best in Ireland, he sent 16 horses to the Cheltenham Festival. It was a mixum-gatherum of long shots and hopeful punts and desperate outsiders and a small portfolio of fancied ones.
How did they fare? One pulled up, two unseated their riders; the others finished 11th, 6th, 13th, 12th, 13th, 16th, 20th, 15th, 8th, 2nd, 4th, 5th and 3rd. No winner. Just one favourite; he bombed out. No runner in the Champion Hurdle or the Champion Chase, and the two that lined up in the Stayers’ Hurdle were sent off at odds of 200-1 and 150-1. His Gold Cup runner, Hedgehunter, was a Grand National horse. He ran on for second. Never nearer.
The really extraordinary thing about that week, though, was not that Mullins drew a blank – his third in seven festivals – but that there were 10 Irish winners saddled by 10 different trainers. Name them? Take your time.
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Mouse Morris, Edward O’Grady, Noel Meade, Tony Martin, Joe Crowley, Michael O’Brien, Colm Murphy, John Joseph Murphy, Raymond Hurley, Philip Rothwell.
It was a freakish year that captured a particular time in Irish life. Celtic Tiger money coursed through racing’s veins, like amphetamine. Nobody was anybody unless they owned a couple of investment properties in Bulgaria and a horse for the big festivals. If you stayed long enough in a late-night lock-in you’d leave the pub owning the leg of a thoroughbred. Buyer’s remorse had no standing in the boom.
But the difference between the flighty money that was in the game back then, and now, is that it was more widely spread. Meade won the trainers’ championship in Ireland that year without training 100 winners. His horses generated prize money of just over €2 million, which was a record at the time, but would have left him a distant third in last year’s table – a staggering five million behind Mullins. A year before that it would only have been good enough for fourth place.
Racing in Ireland has a different economy now. The game is being dominated by seven or eight hugely resourceful, committed owners who are prepared to replenish their stock on an ongoing basis and shop at the high end of the market. Mullins enjoys the patronage of most of those owners, some of them exclusively.
In contrast to 2006, it is not inconceivable that Mullins will saddle 10 winners at Cheltenham in his own right this week. His existing personal best is 10. On the first two days alone, he has 10 favourites in the ante-post markets. At various places in the long, chloroformed build-up it has been suggested that Mullins could train more winners than all the British trainers combined; it is equally possible that he could eclipse all the other Irish trainers.
It doesn’t matter whether people think that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Mullins’s genius for producing the best outcome more often than anybody else is irresistibly attractive to moneybags owners who want to win and have no desire to spend more money than necessary on hard-luck stories. In horse racing, bad luck is omnipresent. The only mitigation is to win as much as you can while the going is good. Mullins offers this service.
In some quarters there is an undeniable boredom with Mullins’s relentless brilliance. That is a difficult feeling to untangle but much easier to explain. In all sports, people have an affinity for underdogs. Mullins doesn’t trade in shock outcomes. He trains the favourite and, in many cases at the big spring festivals, he trains the first three or four in the betting.
If another Mullins horse beats a Mullins favourite, as happened four times at the Dublin Racing Festival last month, it has no value as a feelgood story. Most punters won’t have backed the winner, and the winner won’t be owned by one of the small guys. The story of David and Goliath is one of the most hackneyed metaphors in sport, but it ignores Goliath’s extraordinary winning record.
The other complicating factor is that it is impossible to dislike Mullins. That wouldn’t be true of, say, Tiger Woods or Tom Brady or Alex Ferguson or Novak Djokovic or a host of other serial winners. Regardless of what he has achieved, Mullins is still warm and affable and courteous and grounded and unaffected.
His dominance, though, has killed some of the buzz in the build-up, however churlish that sounds. For Cheltenham fanatics, the weeks leading up to the festival used to be as integral to the fun as the week itself, but that feeling has been tranquilised.
There are not as many Cheltenham preview nights now as there were 15 or 20 years ago, but in recent weeks there has been no shortage either. In Flannery’s pub in Cork City the other night the place was packed 1½ hours before the panel opened their mouths.
But once they did, Mullins’s horses dominated the conversation – not just their respective merits but, crucially, which entry they would take up from their bamboozling array of options. It was like scrolling down the home page on Netflix. David Casey, one of Mullins’s assistants, did his best to clear the fog, but not even he knew all the answers. Nothing is settled until that is settled.
“He’s not bringing many horses this year,” said Shark Hanlon. “Only about 90.” In reality, it will be closer to 70. In 2013, when he trained five winners at the festival, his travelling party was 32.
That was also the year when Mullins broke Tom Dreaper’s record for the Irish trainer with the most festival winners. That number was 26, which had stood for more than 40 years. Mullins is just six winners short of a century now and he will surely hit that mark this week. At any other time in the history of Cheltenham that number didn’t exist. Mullins invented it.
There are still new territories to conquer. Dreaper won five Champion Chases with five different horses; he won five Gold Cups with three different horses. All of that was unimaginable in Dreaper’s time too. Mullins isn’t there yet. He’s not stopping.
Good.
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