Willie Mullins on the agony behind his big Gold Cup moment
Willie Mullins recalls the emotional moment when Al Boum Photo won his first Cheltenham Gold Cup...
THERE is a photograph on the wall in the Lord Bagenal Inn in the pretty town of Leighlinbridge in County Carlow that shows a group of men and women standing proudly in the main street, either side of a horse called Different Pace. Willie Mullins is 32 years old in the picture and he is standing next to the horse’s head, holding its reins loosely in his hands.
Mullins is in his first months as a trainer and his wife, Jackie, is standing in front of the horse’s flank, her right hand holding on to the brim of her hat, lest it blow away in the breeze. The florist, the postman, a builder, a man from the hardware store, the pub landlord and a couple of local doctors make up the rest of the cast staring proudly into the camera lens.
The photo is at the centre of a newspaper article stationed to the left of the bar. ‘Playboys of the Racing World,’ the headline says. Mullins is hoping Different Pace will be his first ever Cheltenham runner and the piece imagines adventures to come, late nights playing cards and carousing, when it heads to the Festival some weeks in the future and most of the town travels there with it.
The writer goes on to describe the horse’s failure at Leopardstown some days later and bemoans money lost and the fragile hopes of Mullins, a man still in his infancy as a trainer. But if the headline is supposed to hint at grandiose dreams destined to be dashed by referencing J.M. Synge’s The
Playboy of the Western World, it picked the wrong man. Different Pace never did make it to Cheltenham but Mullins did. His dreams were made of sterner stuff.
Another 32 years have passed since that photograph was taken and now Mullins is sitting in the kitchen of his farmhouse next to his yard, Closutton, a couple of miles from the Lord Bagenal.
Where once there was Different Pace and not many more, now Mullins stables around 200 horses and when he leaves for Cheltenham next week, it will be as the most successful trainer in the Festival’s history and the man who saddled last year’s Gold Cup winner, Al Boum Photo. He has been Ireland’s champion trainer for 12 seasons in succession and 13 in all. In National Hunt racing, there are few lands left for him to conquer.
Many of his charges are Festival legends. Hurricane Fly, Faugheen, Annie Power, Un De Sceaux, Douvan and Vautour are among them. This year, he says the best bets to add to his winning record are Al Boum Photo again in the Gold Cup, Benie Des Dieux in the Mares’ Hurdle and Asterion Forlonge in the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle. He will take about 50 horses with him across the water to England.
‘At least now we’ve broken the hoodoo, or the ceiling we couldn’t seem to get to before, by winning the Gold Cup,’ Mullins, 63, says. ‘We are going back with a horse that has done it. It is very difficult to repeat it. But certainly I am going back there with a much more positive approach this year.
‘Al Boum Photo is a course-anddistance winner. If you have a horse that likes a course, always bring him back to it.’
Jackie is here, too, rushing to get out for an appointment, but she stops for a moment as they reminisce about the photo in the pub and laugh. ‘We brought the horse down and stopped it on the street,’ says Mullins.
‘And the first eight or 10 people who came, stood in the photograph. It’s a picture for all time. We often think the horse caught a virus that day because it got so cold. That’s why it didn’t get to Cheltenham.’
Most of the dreams Mullins harboured that day have already been realised. He won the Grand National with Hedgehunter in 2005 and last year, after coming runner-up in the Gold Cup six times, he finally claimed National Hunt racing’s biggest prize when Al Boum Photo, a 12-1 shot, overhauled Native River and held off a late charge from Anibale Fly to pass the post first. The Lord Bagenal hosted the celebrations, as it has done for so many of Mullins’ triumphs.
Mullins had been trying to win the Gold Cup for so long that he hardly knew how to react. ‘It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years,’ Paul Newman said when he won the Oscar for Best Actor, for
The Color Of Money, after six previous nominations. ‘Finally she relents and you say: “I am terribly sorry. I’m tired”.’
Mullins smiles at that thought, although in his case, his celebrations were muted because his joy was tempered with worry.
‘I had four runners last year,’ he says.
‘Kemboy fell at the first, another one pulled up early on and then later, Invitation Only, with my son, Patrick, riding it, fell. It looked as if both horse and rider were injured. So for the last circuit, I was worrying about what was going on behind the green screens.
‘I was trying to keep an eye on the race and every time I went back to the race, I could see Al Boum Photo’s jockey, Paul Townend, and it looked as if everything was going right and that we were still in with a chance.
‘I was not able to enjoy the last part of the race, watching what I couldn’t see behind the green screens. That took a lot of the joy of the moment away. Even as he passed the winning post, it was great to win but I still hadn’t a clue what was going on.
‘It is very hard to throw your hat and your binoculars in the air when your son and your horse are down behind a screen. They don’t tell you anything immediately.
‘It was 20 minutes before I found out that my son was okay but that the horse had died.
‘I had been second six times. There are lots of guys who are very good in their fields and never ever win the ultimate prize. I had got over it because I thought I would never win it.’ Mullins acts like a man who would rather die than let a boast escape his lips. He personifies class and dignity. He is known for his loyalty to his staff and his generosity of spirit. Best of all, he exudes quiet contentment.
Four years ago, it felt as if all he had built up was under threat. All those hopes he harboured when he stood in Leighlinbridge’s main street with Different Pace were challenged anew when Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, the owner of the renowned Gigginstown Stud, removed all 60 of its horses from Mullins’ yard after a dispute over training fees.
O’Leary moved many of the horses to Mullins’ arch-rival Gordon Elliott. The loss represented a third of the horses at Closutton. Many wondered whether Mullins, who had been Ireland’s champion trainer for nine years on the run, would ever recover.
‘It was a big thing,’ Mullins says. ‘One third of the business was wiped out overnight. That’s like someone getting docked a third of his wages and having to live off that. You just have to put up with it. We took a stand and he took a stand and that was it. We got used to it.
‘I had no issue with Gordon. It wasn’t Gordon’s fault. It made us feel like underdogs again. We didn’t know if we would ever be champion trainer again, we didn’t know if we could get back to where we were or whether it would take five or six years to do that.’
Mullins astonished Irish racing with the speed with which he regrouped. He managed to hold off Elliott’s challenge in 2016-17 despite the loss of so many of his best horses and held on to the trainers’ title.
The race with Elliott for champion trainer is tight again this season but Mullins has a narrow lead. Last year, Gigginstown announced they were pulling out of racing altogether.
‘It might even be good for Irish racing,’ Mullins says, ‘because now that they are leaving, a lot of other wealthy clients have come into the game to take their place.
‘There is probably more money being spent because other clients see that they have a better chance now of competing at the top table.’