Ireland

Irish supporters in confident mood as annual Cheltenham invasion begins

Irish trainers, led by the formidable Willie Mullins, expected to dominate four frantic days of Cheltenham Festival action

Horse racing fans Cian Linehan, Craig Noonan, Cian Gould and Alex Cummins at Dublin Airport ahead of their departure for the Cheltenham Festival. Photograph: Stephen Collins/Collins Photos

Frank McNally in Cheltenham
Mon Mar 11 2024 - 20:24

Even as the last of Ireland’s rugby supporters returned home on Monday from the weekend’s bitter defeat to England, a new wave of sporting invaders was headed in the opposite direction, this time all but certain of being on the winning side.

If the experts are right, Irish revenge will be swift and brutal at the latest Cheltenham Festival.

It is considered a foregone conclusion that Irish trainers will dominate again. But, thanks to Willie Mullins, there’s a chance that even the People’s Republic of Carlow will have more winners this week than England, Wales, and Scotland combined.

Merely by equaling last year’s total of six – modest for him – Mullins will rack up is 100th Cheltenham winner sometime between now and Friday.

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The eclipse of the home team has become a matter of official concern to the visitors.

“The biggest threat to Irish jumps racing is the demise of British jumps racing,” warned Horse Racing Ireland’s Jonathan Mullin in the run-up to Cheltenham 2024.

While the trainers and most of the jockeys heading out of Dublin Airport on Monday will bid to add to British pain this week, the shrewder Irish punters will be blind to patriotism as they resume their war against the real enemy: bookmakers.

Few of them will have been as well-informed for the battles ahead as Albert Reynolds Junior, son of the late former taoiseach, who was enjoying a pre-flight pint in a crowded airport bar.

Reynolds Junior has spent “two or three hours” a night, every night, for months reviewing race videos and other evidence that might point him to winners this week. “Only since November,” he added, lest it sound like he was taking it too seriously.

“I go to bed early, with the laptop, and do most of it there,” Reynolds said of his working methodology. Is that enough to beat the bookies?

“This would usually be a good meeting for me, yes,” he conceded.

The Irish Times put it to him, quoting former minister for finance and festival regular Charlie McCreevy, that Cheltenham was “the last place you should have a bet” because “they’re all trying here”.

But Reynolds had to “strongly disagree” with that. Because the stakes are so high, “the formbook is reliable” he says. “It’s all there if you can read it.”

It comes as no surprise to be reminded that Reynolds’s day job is “trading in stocks”. They’re the same business really, he agrees: “It’s all one big, long gamble.”

Alongside him in the bar were his brother Philip, a trainer whose horse Riann is in with a good chance later in the week, Philip’s son Mark, Pat Lyster from Roscommon (a cousin of RTÉ’s Michael), and former Galway GAA great Barry Brennan.

Rushing to catch a plane nearby, meanwhile, were former jockey and trainer Charlie Swan and his wife, Carol, who stopped just long enough for a quick word.

Asked for his tip of the week, Swan opted for a safe bet: “It’ll be the Willie Mullins show, I think. Although JP [McManus, owner of multiple horses with many different trainers] has a few good ones too.”

The big focus for the Swans this year, however, will be their son Harry, a 21-year-old amateur jockey who rides in the last race on Thursday, the Kim Muir.

Harry loves racing, says his mother, but is also taking out a sensible each-way bet on his career, via a degree in biological and biomedical science at Trinity College.

Albert Reynolds Junior has attended every Cheltenham since 1989, he told me, when his father paid for the trip “because I was a student with no money”.

That was a year when, notoriously, Ireland failed to produce a single winner. A whitewash had been narrowly avoided in both 1987 and 1988, when only Galmoy won for the visiting team.

This year, some predict as many as 20 Irish wins, and it would be no surprise if half of those were trained by Willie Mullins. In the meantime, Tuesday’s opening day will also honour another member of the Mullins dynasty, his mother Maureen, who died recently aged 94.

In what has become a tradition for commemorating famous figures, the National Hunt Chase will be temporarily renamed for her. The event is run over a marathon of almost four miles. As another of Maureen’s sons, trainer Tony, said, it’s an apt memorial for “a great stayer”.

Frank McNally

Frank McNally

Frank McNally is an Irish Times journalist and chief writer of An Irish Diary

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