DAYS TO GO
THE great irony of his Festival last year was how the race that became a turning point was won by a horse known for the equine composure of a drugs mule with unravelling secrets. What thoughts, you wonder, must have crowded Willie Mullins’ head, watching Ruby Walsh guide that notorious blackguard Yorkhill down to the start of the JLT Novices’ Chase? Two days down, two blanks on the sheet for Closutton. And a spell of gloom on the yard that Chopin could have put music to.
When a lame 2/9 Douvan had been reduced to an anecdote in Wednesday’s Champion Chase, we watched Mullins and owner Rich Ricci go through their stone-faced forensic-like mourners pitched upon a theatre stage. In that moment, the enclosure could have been a war room.
Now, first race Thursday, Mullins looked to Yorkhill for redemption. To this “big, ignorant yoke”, as Andrew McNamara recently described him, taking to the challenge of Cheltenham’s fences with the manageable compliance that every single soul in the valley knew was alien to his nature.
It looked as if Willie was investing faith in a rodeo ride. Except, of course, the feet in the stirrups were Ruby’s.
When people talk of great Cheltenham rides, Walsh’s coercion of Yorkhill, specifically the extent to which he codded and manipulated and, essentially, brain-washed the horse into settling for an inside line where he had a reputation for seeing snakes in the grass, should be right up there.
A jockey weighing, say, 65kg, can’t possibly have physical command of a creature tipping the scales at 500-plus. The only relationship that can work between them is one based on human intuition and intelligence.
Walsh himself has likened his earliest days in the saddle to “Benny Hill on a horse”, so it says something for his capacity to self-educate that he is now seen as the very definition of ethereal lightness on the most complicated and quarrelsome of horses.
That victory on Yorkhill kick-started a run of four victories on Day Three for the Mullins-Walsh combination, restating their position as the most trustworthy Festival collaboration of modern times.
And the wonder of it all had been Mullins’ good manners and easy courtesy when in the eye of the storm.
Jockeys used to say of his father, Paddy, that he could tell them more about their mount after a race than they knew themselves. When Willie Mullins was asked about those first two blank days last year, he assured us that he couldn’t see too many instances of his horses being assailed by bad luck. In other words, he knew this didn’t amount to any dark conspiracy of the fates.
He simply counselled realism and patience, proving neither precious before Yorkhill’s victory, nor sanctimonious after.
Mullins had gone to Gloucestershire an 8/15 favourite to finish leading trainer at the Festival for the sixth time in seven years. By the start of Day Three, he was friendless in that market. So to eventually lose his crown only on countback, having tied with Gordon Elliott on six winners apiece, must have felt like some kind of seismic personal triumph.
After all, he’d lost an estimated 60 Gigginstown horses from his yard the previous September in a conflict over training fees and would, ultimately, be pushed to the final race of the National Hunt season at Punchestown to secure a 10th consecutive Irish trainers’ title after an extraordinary, season-long chase of a “heartbroken” Elliott.
That title safely secured, Mullins candidly reflected: “It’s been a funny season. It hasn’t been very enjoyable and I’m glad it’s over!”
His six Festival wins in 2017 drew him to within four of Nicky Henderson’s record (58) and there’s little doubt he will entertain real ambition of narrowing that gap over the coming week in the Cotswolds. That won’t be easy, mind, given Henderson boasts the current market favourites to win the three principal Festival prizes.
Having Buveur d’Air (4/9 for The Champion Hurdle), Altior (4/6 for the Champion Chase) and Might Bite (3/1 for the Gold Cup) in one yard means Henderson is seen as having a shot at becoming the first trainer in Cheltenham history to win the Festival’s three biggest prizes in the same year.
Ostensibly, that might seem to put him in better shape than Mullins.
But a suspicion brews that the Closutton maestro is perfectly happy heading to this year’s Festival with so much preview spotlight focusing heavily on Seven Barrows. For the truth is Mullins looks set to have chances in every Championship race too, without the complicating energy o f g o ing there
❝ If there’s something on, get over it. If you dwell on it, you’ll never win anything. Just go out there with more grit next time
leap of faith to imagine him getting the better of Altior next week, albeit Henderson’s horse was confined to his box for a month following a wind operation.
Factoring in how his No.1 jockey, Walsh, has been out of the saddle for three months, you might imagine that Mullins has serious cause for foreboding as he heads to the West Country.
Yet, he has always taken his lead from the kind of people who regard success and failure as twin imposters. Four years ago, people thought he might lodge an appeal against Lord Windermere’s victory in the Gold Cup after a lengthy stewards’ enquiry focused on interference with his horse, On His Own.
Mullins has yet to win that great race, saddling the runner-up on a remarkable six occasions now. Yet he had no interest in breaking his duck via appeal.
In Punchestown two years ago, he told me: “A lot of people said we should have appealed, but I didn’t want, and my owner certainly didn’t want, to win it in the middle of May in London. There’d be no joy coming out with that. I used to be the opposite, but now I treat it as a ref ’s decision in a match. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a ref change his mind but, every week in football, you see 10 players around one giving out. Crazy stuff.
“That’s what I love about Brian Cody and Kilkenny hurling, they get on with the game. I love the way they come out and play, end of story. You get a kick on