All eyes on crowds and clouds for start of Galway Festival

The eyes of the country and beyond will be on Ballybrit for Monday’s start of the renowned Galway Festival.

It is the 154th renewal of a unique racing and social event where up to 130,000 people are expected to attend over the coming seven days with more than €2 million worth of prizemoney fought over.

On the track there is potential for history when Tudor City bids for an unprecedented hat-trick of victories in Thursday’s featured Guinness Galway Hurdle.

A day earlier the festival’s other big €270,000 pot, the Tote Galway Plate, will see last year’s winner Hewick try to defy topweight for his trainer ‘Shark’ Hanlon.

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One of his main threats is likely to be Kilcruit from the all-conquering Willie Mullins yard, which is operating at a near 50 per cent strike rate so far this season.

Siding with Mullins will be a default move for racegoers who could bet in the region of €7 million with racecourse bookmakers at Ballybrit this week.

Whether the festival benefits from a rally in overall attendance figures so far in 2023 will be closely monitored.

Having lost its traditional position as the best attended festival to Punchestown, like many other fixtures Galway saw a slip in crowd figures during last year’s post-pandemic festival.

[ Fingers being kept crossed for resurgence of Galway festival’s popular appeal ]

An official figure of just under 117,000 during the seven days in 2022 reflected a wider national slide.

However, half-yearly statistics issued by Horse Racing Ireland for the first six months of 2023 showed a 7.6 per cent surge overall on the same period in 2022.

Capitalising on that trend will be a priority for what is always one of the most high-profile racing events of the year.

Terrestrial TV coverage begins on Monday on RTÉ 2 which will have coverage of the first four days. Friday and Saturday’s action will be live on TG4.

The weather fates don’t appear particularly co-operative with a mostly unsettled forecast for the week ahead, which might have an impact on numbers through the turnstiles.

It’s a similar story in terms of the racing action with up to eight mm of rainfall forecast before racing starts at 5.10 on Monday evening.

Ground conditions on Sunday night were already heavy on the flat track while they’re soft on the National Hunt circuit. Galway is singular in hosting mixed cards between the codes.

On Sunday, Hanlon warned that Hewick may not try to defend his Plate title if conditions get too testing.

“He handles cut but he wouldn’t want soft to heavy ground,” he reported. “If it ends up soft to heavy, he might not run.”

Hanlon and his 16-year-old son Paddy team up for the outsider Phoenix Cowboy in Monday’s feature, the €110,000 Connacht Hotel Handicap, which has a maximum field of 20 runners.

A year ago, Patrick Mullins finally landed what’s widely regarded as Ireland’s ‘Amateur Derby’ and the sport’s most successful non-professional rider is back for another crack on board Lot Of Joy.

The former Scandinavian Classic winner was fourth to Echoes In Rain in 2022 and joins her stable companions Scaramanga, Maze Runner and the 2017 winner Whiskey Sour in a four-pronged Willie Mullins challenge.

Mullins has won this four times in the last six years, part of a remarkable run of success that has seen him crowned top trainer at the festival for the last eight years, with a whopping 79 winners in that period.

He is an overwhelming favourite to continue that dominance this week, although punters will be aware of perhaps even more impressive recent statistics from his nephew.

Emmet Mullins has a 29 per cent strike-rate at the festival over the last five years and saddles the ante-post favourite, Teed Up, for Monday’s big race.

Teed Up is a proven winner at the course, including over hurdles at last year’s festival, although betting value might be had through Cougar, one of two JP McManus-owned runners.

Cougar will be ridden by point-to-point racing’s most successful ever rider, Derek O’Connor, who won this race all of 20 years ago on Rapid Deployment.

The former Champion Hurdle winner Annie Power began her racing career at the 2012 festival and her son, Mystical Power, is a likely favourite in the opener.

Denis Hogan rode Darkened to win the first handicap hurdle a year ago and the horse, a festival winner on the flat in 2020, is back again off an identical rating.

Hogan, who has had a three-month suspension for drug breaches postponed until September, has booked Daniel King to employ a 5lb claim in a tightly compressed handicap.