Willie Mullins closing in on 100 Cheltenham Festival winners

By John Ingles

Horse Racing

Mon February 19, 2024 · 9M ago

John Ingles charts Willie Mullins' Cheltenham journey from his first training success at the Festival in 1995 to having a century of winners in his sights.

The 1995 Supreme Novices’ Hurdle turned out to be a significant race in the history of jumps racing, though not that anyone would have known it at the time. The horses involved have not left their mark to any great degree but two of the humans involved, who were both celebrating ‘firsts’ in the race, would go on to rewrite the sport’s history books. The 20-year-old jockey having his first Festival ride, on the 100/1 outsider Supreme Master who finished out the back, was A. P. McCoy, while the trainer unsaddling his first Festival winner, the 25/1 shot Tourist Attraction, was Willie Mullins.

Less than 30 years later, Mullins is long odds on to win his hundredth race at the Festival as a trainer, needing six more winners this year to reach that landmark. That would be an astonishing achievement given that Nicky Henderson is the only other trainer to have passed the half-century (73 winners) while Paul Nicholls needs another couple of winners to reach the 50 mark this year. Henderson had a ten-year head start over Mullins, saddling his first Festival winners in 1985, and had a total of 17 on the board by the time Tourist Attraction got Mullins off the mark.

Henderson briefly went on to become the Festival’s most successful trainer, in 2012 passing the existing record of 40 wins which had been set by fellow Lambourn trainer Fulke Walwyn. But Mullins was rapidly closing the gap, and seven winners at the 2018 Festival took him past Henderson’s total to leave him on 61. While Henderson has added 13 winners of his own over the five Festivals since, Mullins has powered clear with another 33 in the same period.

‘When you start training, you hope for one winner here’ said Mullins after passing Henderson’s total. ‘That is the aspiration most Irish trainers have. This isn’t something we ever dreamt of because we thought we couldn’t do that with a base in Ireland.’

But Mullins was far from being the first Irish trainer to make a significant impact at the Festival. Training legends Tom Dreaper and Vincent O’Brien began their successful Festival raids shortly after the Second World War. O’Brien won 23 Festival races before making an even greater name for himself on the Flat, his standout Festival winners being the triple Gold Cup winner Cottage Rake and Hatton’s Grace who achieved the same feat in the Champion Hurdle. Dreaper’s Festival career lasted longer, until 1971, by which time he had trained 26 Cheltenham winners, notably the greatest steeplechaser Arkle, another triple Gold Cup winner, and his brilliant contemporary of the mid-sixties Flyingbolt who won at three consecutive Festivals, including the Champion Chase.

It was 2013 before Mullins overtook Dreaper to become Ireland’s most successful trainer at the Cheltenham Festival. For a long time after Tourist Attraction, he continued to have one or maybe two winners at most at the Festival. In the early days of training Festival winners, Mullins was still riding as well so that he was both the trainer and jockey of his 1996 Champion Bumper winner Wither Or Which. The Champion Bumper provided Mullins with four of his first six Festival successes and it’s a race that he has now won a record 12 times in all.

It was the 2011 Festival which can be said to have signalled the start of Mullins’ domination of the meeting. Four winners was not only a personal best score for him at the time, it was also enough to make him the top trainer at the meeting for the first time. Mullins has now been leading trainer ten times at the Cheltenham Festival, including for each of the last five years, and has set record totals of eight in 2015 and then ten in 2022. The 2011 Festival was also significant as it saw him one of the championship races for the first time, with Hurricane Fly winning the first of his two Champion Hurdles.

It’s taking nothing away from Mullins’ achievements to point out that the Festival is a very different meeting now from when he registered that first win with Tourist Attraction. There were 20 races back then compared with the 28 today, with the Festival having expanded from three to four days in 2005. The addition of the Champion Bumper, or Festival Bumper as it originally was, to the meeting just years before his first win gave him a chance to exploit one of his specialisms which didn’t exist in the days of O’Brien and Dreaper.

The subsequent addition of three mares’ races to the Festival has been another development that has very much played to the Mullins stable’s strengths. He has won the David Nicholson Mares’ Hurdle nine times, eight of those victories coming consecutively and six of them with the remarkable Quevega. Mullins has won two of the three editions of the Mares’ Chase and the first five runnings of the Mares’ Novices Hurdle named after the Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup winner Dawn Run trained by his father Paddy.

Expanded opportunities at the Festival are all very well but you have to have the good horses to exploit them, and that’s been the other key to Mullins’ success. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he has assembled an array of major owners, notably British-based ones, with the means to afford the best young jumping prospects sourced from France, as well as Ireland, with the help of bloodstock agents such as Harold Kirk and Pierre Boulard. The likes of Rich and Susannah Ricci, Joe and Marie Donnelly, Simon Munir and Isaac Souede and Cheveley Park Stud, along with Andrea and Graham Wylie in the past, have owned many of Mullins’ best jumpers, so that the loss of another major supporter, Michael O’Leary’s Gigginstown House Stud in the autumn of 2016, wasn’t the blow that it might have been.

It was only since welcoming owners such as these, and others, on board that Mullins was able to start winning more of the Festival’s championship events. We’ve already mentioned the Champion Hurdle which Mullins has won again twice since Hurricane Fly with Faugheen and Annie Power, both owned by the Riccis.

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Next came two consecutive editions of the Stayers’ Hurdle, won by Nichols Canyon for the Wylies in 2017 and Penhill for Tony Bloom in 2018, the latter also the owner of Energumene who gave Mullins an overdue first success in the Queen Mother Champion Chase in 2022 before following up last year.

Mullins was also kept waiting for his first win in the biggest Festival prize of all. He had the Gold Cup runner-up on no fewer than six occasions before the Donnellys’ dual winner Al Boum Photo came along in 2019 and 2020, a feat last year’s winner Galopin des Champs is poised to match next month.

No appraisal of Mullins’ march towards his century at the Festival would be complete without also acknowledging the part played by the stable’s jockeys, notably Ruby Walsh, rider of a record 59 winners at the meeting, and his former understudy Paul Townend, now the most successful jockey at the Festival still riding with a current total of 28 wins, all bar two of those for Mullins.

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