Donn McClean on the landmarks that have shaped Willie Mullins' incredible training career so far, from Tourist Attraction to Cheltenham Gold Cup hero Al Boum Photo.
There are landmarks. Landmark days, landmark horses. Like Silver Batchelor, who won a bumper at Thurles in February 1988, owned by Princess Zoe’s owner Paddy Kehoe, ridden by Willie Mullins, trained by Willie Mullins. A first winner for Willie Mullins, trainer.
Little acorns.
Like Tourist Attraction in the curtain-raiser at the 1995 Cheltenham Festival, the Citroen Supreme Novices’ Hurdle. Irish Cheltenham winners then were not like Irish Cheltenham winners now. A smattering was a success. The norm was two or three or four, and the memory of the 1989 wipeout was only starting to fade.
The Pat Flynn-trained Montelado had won the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle under Charlie Swan two years earlier but, before that, there hadn’t been an Irish-trained Supreme Novices’ Hurdle winner since Tommy Carmody had ridden Buck House to victory for Mouse Morris in 1983.
Tourist Attraction was the first of just four Irish-trained winners at the 1995 Cheltenham Festival, and that was significant, but we didn’t realise the greater significance of that victory. Nobody did. Nobody could. She was the first of 72 Willie Mullins-trained Cheltenham Festival winners. More than any other trainer ever. And counting.
Wither Or Which was a landmark horse too. The Welsh Term gelding had been impressive in winning his bumper on his racecourse debut at Leopardstown on New Year’s Eve 1995, and the offers rolled in. The Champion Bumper at Cheltenham was not that old, there had only been four runnings before 1996 and the Irish had won three of them. The demand for the best Irish bumper horse was intense.
Willie Mullins had to decide: are we trainers or traders? He decided on the former. Deal or no deal, the horse was staying in the yard and Willie Mullins was going to ride him at Cheltenham.
So he did. One of four amateur riders among 20 professionals in the Champion Bumper: Richard Dunwoody and Jamie Osborne and Charlie Swan and Mark Dwyer and Mick Fitzgerald and Carl Llewellyn and Graham Bradley and Richard Johnson (claiming 3lb). Mr W Mullins on Wither Or Which led them all home. His third Cheltenham Festival winner as a rider, his second as a trainer.
There was the landmark first trainers’ championship, the 2000/01 championship, when Mullins amassed more prize money than Noel Meade. There were the six years that ensued, during which Noel Meade was dominant and Willie Mullins struggled to see how he would ever wrest the title back. But he did. He won the title again in 2007/08, and he has won it ever year since. That’s 14 champion trainer titles. And counting.
Things have changed in the interim. The competition has become more intense and Willie Mullins has had to push the bar even higher in order to keep it out of reach of whipper-snapper Gordon Elliott. To put the degree to which the goalposts moved in a decade into context, when Mullins won the championship in 2007/08, he trained 111 winners in Ireland, and he earned €2.2 million in prize money for his owners. When he won it in 2018/19, he had 207 winners, and he amassed over €6.2 million in prize money.
That’s part of it, an ability to adapt, but it’s only a part of it. You don’t get to the top and stay at the top if you don’t change with changing times, changing situations. You need to have the horses, of course. You won’t succeed if you don’t have the horses, and you won’t have the horses if you don’t succeed. One begets the other. You start the small snowball and you get it rolling, keep it rolling. Horses come and go, owners come and go. Willie Mullins has never relied on one horse, on one owner. Change is embraced, and it’s seamless. Never think that one owner will be your pension, his dad told him.
There’s the team, some team, which includes Ruby Walsh and David Casey and Patrick Mullins and Jackie Mullins. And all the staff, all the riders. All of similar mindset, all familiar with and comfortable with the Mullins ethos, every one a contributor. It’s not by accident that a team of that calibre had been assembled. And you talk about seamless, Paul Townend taking over from Ruby Walsh as first jockey. You don’t not miss Ruby Walsh, but Paul Townend is a top class rider, and he was being prepared for this job since the day that he walked into Closutton for the first time.
And there’s everything else, all the intangibles that fuse together. There’s the experience, the awareness. Call it horse sense, call it intuition, call it genius. The knowledge, the imagination, the open-mindedness to change things, not for change’s sake, but when change is needed. Like with Vautour, like with Concertista. Tweaks that make the difference, modifications that enable horses to fulfill their potential, to perform to the height of their respective abilities.
There are the big horses of course, the big races, the big days. The records. Hurricane Fly, 22 Grade 1 wins. Ten for 10 at Leopardstown, all 10 Grade 1s. Quevega, six wins at the Cheltenham Festival. Florida Pearl and Annie Power and Vautour and Douvan and Un De Sceaux and Faugheen. Ten Champion Bumpers, 10 Irish Gold Cups, nine mares’ hurdles, eight Punchestown Champion Hurdles, six Supreme Novices’ Hurdles, five French Champion Hurdles. And the Grand National, the King George, the Tingle Creek Chase. The Nakayama Grand Jump. In Japan. A jump race on the far side of the world, where any further east is west. And two Cheltenham Gold Cups.
Before last year, Willie Mullins had started to think that the Cheltenham Gold Cup was one that would pass him by. When you get as close as he got, six times runner-up, you can be forgiven for adopting that mindset. Then Al Boum Photo won it in 2019, then Al Boum Photo won it in 2020.
That was another landmark. And another landmark. And we’re still counting.
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