It was Bismarck who declared it’s best to make history rather than write it. Willie Mullins is no Otto in the strident stakes. But in all the debate about his supremacy being a problem for racing, it does no harm sometimes to point out just how monumental this dominance is.
Bookmaker odds suggest the Irishman is all but certain to retain his British trainers’ championship when the cross-channel jumps season winds up at Sandown on Saturday.
Next week will see Ireland’s National Hunt campaign end at Punchestown. A 19th domestic trainers’ title has long since been wrapped up by Mullins. At last year’s festival he became the winning-most Irish trainer of all time, with nearly 4,500 career winners and counting.
So ingrained has this Mullins stranglehold become that it’s all but taken for granted, serving sometimes as a starting point for discourse about wider competitive implications for the sport from having a single prepotent figure.
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There are valid concerns about one person possessing an unprecedented concentration of power. Healthy competition requires more than a dominant team divvying up its best players to suit itself.
There’s also some good old-fashioned begrudgery at play, and not just rooted in bruised cross-channel morale. There’s plenty of domestic resentment too, qualified by acknowledgment that it’s not anyone’s fault, and a great achievement and all the rest, but still, you know yourself.
Whatever the gripe, though, taken on its own merits there’s no way but to see what’s happening as the very definition of racing history. The nature of the beast is to rarely fully grasp the proportional nature of times we’re living through day by day. But this is watershed stuff.
The quality of the Mullins squad lining up at Sandown on Saturday underlines the point. A horse such as Gaelic Warrior would be assured pride of place in most any other stable. In the context of this British title scrap, he’s a transferable talent.
That’s because Mullins’s primary focus will again be on Punchestown. Last year he pulled off a final day championship victory at Sandown before once more dominating on home ground in Ireland’s final big festival date. It was a season that ultimately yielded a world record 39 Grade One victories and smacked of a unique set of circumstances. Except here we are again.
The scale of Saturday’s Sandown challenge will be more obvious to Dan Skelton than anyone, but it could be worse for the Englishman who is fighting doggedly to secure a career-defining first championship.
Mullins’s real A-list strength is waiting for Punchestown. His teeth are firmly into this British title race but not at the expense of taking his eyes of the prize at home. He is making the Iron Chancellor’s greatest fear – fighting on two fronts – look straightforward.
It’s important to keep in mind too how this dramatic finale at Sandown might easily have been unnecessary.
It risks visiting the territory of aunts, balls and uncles but if State Man had cleared the last flight of the Champion Hurdle, then the winning pot would have made any final-day showdown redundant. Or if ground conditions hadn’t turned against Galopin Des Champs in the Gold Cup. Both horses won those hugely lucrative races last year.
Just how unique a status Mullins fills now is illustrated too by how 10 Cheltenham winners last month – 36 per cent of the festival races – almost felt unremarkable. Fact To File in the Ryanair was closest to a championship success and at the time it left Skelton all but unbackable to lift the British title.
A subsequently spectacular Aintree, topped by an unprecedented show of Grand National dominance, has once again made the unthinkable seem almost normal.
How the most powerful operation in National Hunt racing history has evolved can never be explained in silver bullet terms. The personable face Mullins presents to the world can suggest its all some happenstance rather than the consequence of strategic thinking from a driven individual whose judgment is ultimately where every buck stops.
Crucial to all of it, though, is the identification of young talent. Success breeds success but all of it is rooted in a spotting system in France, in particular, that is proven over time to strike first. It means Mullins spends a lot of time living rent-free inside his rivals’ heads.
Behind the urbane exterior, too, is ruthless ambition that at 68 sees him planning to expand his Closutton operation even more.
A glimpse of that steely competitive edge came when a largely token attempt by Horse Racing Ireland to increase opportunities for others by excluding the country’s top trainers from 60 races had to be abandoned after solicitors’ letters started flying.
Much more obvious are the diplomatic skills that have the richest owners in the sport lining up to have horses trained in Closutton and happy to have them dispersed to all corners of the UK in the last fortnight.
The result is history unfolding before our eyes. Whatever disgruntlement at this superiority might be written or said, only the most myopic can fail to recognise the scale of achievements that truly haven’t been seen before.
Something for the Weekend
Mullins has half the field for Saturday’s big handicap at Sandown but relies solely on Kitzbuhel (3.0) in the earlier Select Hurdle. Pretty much everything went wrong for him at Aintree last time, particularly running too keenly. With that under his belt, he can emerge on top.
The Breeders’ Cup champion Tarnawa was only third in Navan’s Salsabil Stakes six years ago. Her sibling Tarima (3.55) can do better. After blowing the start on her Leopardstown debut she eased through to win easily. Ezeliya won the Salsabil for the Weld team a year ago en route to Oaks glory at Epsom. A Classic attempt can be the on the cards too for Tarima.
