KING OF CHELTS STILL GETS THE WILLIES
Mullins nervous despite record 10 winners last year
Willie Mullins is the king of Cheltenham.
The fate of 250,000 punters on track and millions across the world across four days this week lie mostly in his hands.
With 88 Festival winners already in the bag, it is not completely impossible he could smash through the century mark.
The Mullins army is frightening. From Facile Vega in Tuesday’s opener to Galopin Des Champs in Friday’s Gold Cup, ability drips out of the travelling horse boxes with the likes of State Man, Energumene and Stattler in the gang.
But, king of the Cotswolds or not, he’ll be the same as everyone else at 1.30pm on Tuesday – a bag of nerves just praying for a winner, any winner.
Racing might fear the might of
Mullins but that doesn’t mean he heads for Cheltenham without any worries and trepidation of his own.
He said: “Every time I go back, once the first or second race is over, it reminds you how hard it is.
“You go for the Supreme, every horse fights for every blade of grass.
“Going to the first hurdle, then the second, then round the bend and past the stands, it’s rough and it is tough. It is just immense compared to normal day-to-day racing. Nothing is given but that’s what makes it special and hard to win there.
“Yes, people expect us to have winners at Cheltenham but we never go there expecting. It’s a relief when we get one and then hopefully one or two more.
“It’s bit nerve-racking sitting on the first day with no winner. One year we had no winner in the first two days but thankfully it came right. Thankfully, we’ve a broad squad of horses and you just keep hoping there is nothing wrong.”
It’s hard to imagine a man with his firepower fretting.
A man who fired in a record-breaking 10 winners at last year’s Festival.
But it’s that edge, that refusal to overlook a single issue, that dedication and desire to get it spot on when the big days come around, that separates him.
Expertise and graft have made the situation and he said: “We pinch ourselves every night we go out to the yard to check the horses, with the type of stuff that’s there. But it didn’t arrive here on a parachute.
“It took years and years of work and wondering why we hadn’t horses like that. I remember when the Vincent O’Brien Gold Cup, at Leopardstown, was invented and I was wondering would we ever have a horse good enough to run in it, never mind win it.
“So we put in plenty of years when we were looking up at the guys up there thinking would we ever have horses like that here.
“We were lucky we got a team together, from staff to owners, and it wasn’t as if it just landed here from the planet Mars.
“It was a lot of hard work and a lot of disappointment. As we say in racing, it’s 90 per cent disappointment.
“There’s a lot of stuff that goes on that people who make comments like that don’t understand.
“I know it’s going back to any team in any sport – it takes years and years to build, so we’re lucky we’re in the position we’re in. We’re always wondering when is it going to go down and that’s why you have to keep trying to make it better.
“They say we have 14 favourites for Cheltenham and around half the favourites win every year, so that’s not a bad number to have!”
As we say in racing, it’s 90 per cent disappointment