With Willie Mullins clocking up his 4,000th winner as a trainer on Saturday, John Ingles highlights the landmark victories.
Willie Mullins reached another milestone in his career as Ireland’s most prolific trainer of jumpers when Bronn brought up his 4,000th career success in the beginners' chase at Fairyhouse on Saturday. That came almost 35 years after his very first success as a trainer when Silver Batchelor won a bumper at Thurles in February 1988, ridden by Mullins himself.
He was Ireland’s champion amateur jockey six times, though it’s through outstanding success as a trainer that Mullins has earned a reputation which extends well beyond the shores of his own country where he was crowned champion jumps trainer for a 16th time at the end of the 2021/22 season, a title he’s held every year since 2007/08.
Besides dominating on his home turf, Mullins has established himself as the most successful trainer in the history of the Cheltenham Festival. A record ten winners there last March brought his current total of Festival victories to 88, the first of which came when the mare Tourist Attraction caused a 25/1 surprise in the 1995 Supreme Novices’ Hurdle. Mullins has now won the Supreme seven times, including with Douvan and Vautour, two of the highest-rated horses he has trained later in their careers as chasers.
But it’s the Champion Bumper in which Mullins has had most success at the Festival. His first winner, Wither Or Which in 1996, dates from the time when he was still riding, as well as training, winners, while last March Facile Vega brought his total in that race to 12. That horse, incidentally, is the son of another of Mullins’ significant Cheltenham winners, Quevega, whose six victories in the Mares’ Hurdle constitutes a record at the Festival.
It wasn’t until well into his training career, once starting to attract big-spending owners, that Mullins began to make his mark in the main championship races at Cheltenham. The first of those prizes to fall to Closutton was the Champion Hurdle, won by Hurricane Fly in 2011. The same horse won back his title two years later before the Rich and Susannah Ricci-owned pair Faugheen and Annie Power won back-to-back renewals in 2015 and 2016.
A couple of Stayers’ Hurdles, courtesy of Nichols Canyon and Penhill, soon followed in 2017 and 2018, and, after saddling the runner-up no fewer than six times, Mullins finally won the biggest Cheltenham prize of all when Al Boum Photo won the Gold Cup in 2019, a victory he repeated a year later. The Queen Mother Champion Chase proved still more elusive until Energumene gave his trainer a first win in that contest last March.
While Mullins hasn’t been champion trainer in Britain, he went very close in 2015/16 when the title was only resolved in Paul Nicholls’ favour on the final day of the season at Sandown. As far as the big spring festivals are concerned, Mullins’ focus is more on Cheltenham and Punchestown rather than Aintree, but in 2005 he won the Grand National with Hedgehunter. It was to be another 14 years before he first won the Irish Grand National with Burrows Saint.
One of the first of many top-notch chasers Mullins has trained was Florida Pearl, also one of his early Champion Bumper winners and later successful at the Festival again in the Royal & SunAlliance Chase. While Florida Pearl missed out on a Cheltenham Gold Cup (runner-up in 2000), he won a record four Irish Gold Cups at Leopardstown and landed a major prize on British soil when winning the 2001 King George VI Chase, a race Mullins won again last season with outsider Tornado Flyer.
Jumps trainers have much less scope for international success than their Flat counterparts, but that hasn’t stopped Mullins setting his sights further than just Britain when it comes to big prizes abroad. When Nobody Told Me won the Grande Course de Haies d’Auteuil in 2003, she became the first overseas horse to win France’s top hurdle since the great Dawn Run trained by Mullins’ father Paddy to whom he served as assistant in his younger days.
As well as winning ‘the French Champion Hurdle’ on another four occasions since, among other successful raids on Auteuil, Mullins has paved the way for the likes of David Pipe, Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson to win the same race. Mullins hasn’t won the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris yet but Franco de Port’s third place in last year’s race was the best showing by an overseas horse in the top French chase for almost 50 years.
Mullins’ enterprise at finding opportunities overseas paid off most spectacularly with Blackstairmountain who remains the only European-trained horse to win the Nakayama Grand Jump, Japan’s most valuable race over jumps, after his success in 2003. More recently, Mullins has won valuable prizes further afield on the Flat – in both Australia and Saudi Arabia – with the mare True Self who began her career in bumpers.
Indeed, True Self is a reminder that not all of Mullins’ big winners have been confined to the jumps. Another to start out in bumpers was the remarkably versatile Wicklow Brave, winner of the 2016 Irish St Leger, whose other successes included a County Hurdle, a Punchestown Champion Hurdle and a Grade 3 novice chase. Among important staying handicaps on the Flat in Britain, Mullins has won an Ebor, three editions of the Cesarewitch and four renewals of the Ascot Stakes, while also at Royal Ascot he has won the Queen Alexandra Stakes four times, including the last couple of runnings with Stratum.
Remarkably, it is less than five years since he clocked up 3,000 winners – at Wexford in June 2018. It begs the question of what else Mullins, aged 66, might achieve before he decides to hand over the reins at Closutton to son Patrick. Certainly a hundred Cheltenham Festival winners looks a very feasible target, maybe as early as next season.
Perhaps the last word should go to Mullins junior on the secret of his father’s success. ‘Being a good trainer is more than having fit horses. He’s well able to source good owners and he’s well able to source good horses for those owners and that’s the key. We have so many expensive horses coming into our yard every season. There’s new blood every year. He’s never sat back. He’s continually looking for the next crop of horses and the next crop of owners.’
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