“It’s done but not quite dusted yet,” was Willie Mullins’s assessment earlier this week of the race for the National Hunt trainers’ championship race, but he knows as well as anyone that the title is as good as won. Six weeks on from one historic achievement, when he became the first trainer to saddle 100 Cheltenham Festival winners, another beckons. Jump racing feels like Willie’s World now, and the rest of us are just living in it.
Once the final seven events of the 2023-24 season have been run at Sandown Park on Saturday, the winners of around 99.3% of the 3,500 races will have been saddled by someone else. Mullins, though, will have taken enough of the races that really matter – including nine at the Cheltenham Festival and both the English and Scottish Grand Nationals – to be confirmed as the first trainer based in Ireland to win the title since Vincent O’Brien in 1954.
That in itself is a momentous triumph for the trainer and the team at his all-conquering stable in County Carlow, but what is almost as remarkable is that, until the final few weeks of the campaign, no-one really expected it to happen. A few days after his latest tour-de-force at Cheltenham, Mullins could still be backed at a double-figure price for the UK title, as Paul Nicholls, the 14-times champion, and his former assistant, Dan Skelton, seemed poised to go head-to-head for the line.
Even the man himself suggests that the championship did not cross his mind until “a few weeks before the Grand National, and I said, if we are lucky enough to win it [the National], then we would be in with a shout”. The shout turned into a near-certainty last weekend, when Mullins had four winners in all on the Scottish Grand National card at Ayr, and the only price still available on Mullins for the title on Friday was 1.01 (or 1-100) on Betfair.
“Vincent was a legend of legends in racing,” Mullins said this week. “To have your name up against him is something you could never dream of, it’s extraordinary stuff. When you start off training, you dream maybe of being Irish champion trainer, you never dream of being English champion trainer.
“I was lucky enough to meet him once or twice, but I never dreamt that could be as good as him or anything like that. But I looked at what he did and how he achieved it and I thought, can we do something similar over jumps? He wasn’t afraid to source horses in different places and we have gone everywhere we can to source horses, which I think is one of the key things at Closutton.”
In addition to Vincent O’Brien, Mullins’s first UK championship success also mirrors the more recent achievements of Aidan O’Brien, Ireland’s leading trainer on the Flat. O’Brien won his first title in 2001, mounted a successful defence in 2002 and has since won another four, in 2007, 2008, 2016 and 2017.
So it was perhaps a slight surprise to find Mullins as the 5-1 fourth-favourite for next year’s championship, behind Nicholls, Skelton and Nicky Henderson, when William Hill priced it up earlier this week. Mullins sent just a dozen runners to Britain in the first eight months of the season, and effectively ignored dozens of valuable races at the big weekend meetings in October, November and December. Had he taken a little more interest through the winter months, Mullins would probably have won the title at a canter.
If we could be sure that Mullins will be a more regular visitor to Britain in the run-up to Christmas this year, the 5-1 for a successful defence could be one of the bets of the season. Mullins, though, is not committing to anything just yet.
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“That could happen, but we’ll see what type of horses we have,” he said. “But let’s get this [championship] done first, and Punchestown [next week] done, and then we’ll have a break and have a look at next year. I don’t want to make any plans at this stage anyhow, but maybe we’ll keep one eye on it and see how things go.”
Mullins is swift to credit the huge team of staff at his yard for their role in his rise to pre-eminence in recent years. “Those type of people don’t exist to be hired,” he says. “They’re our own academy nearly, for want of a better word, they’ve come through from the time they were younger, they know how everything works here and they make it very easy for me.”
Saturday’s card at Sandown, meanwhile, will finally banish the ghost of 2016, when Mullins was odds-on for the title with eight days to go but lost out to Nicholls on the final afternoon.
“Back in 2016, we thought we were going to go very close and we went down to the last three races I think, until mathematically we couldn’t do it,” Mullins says. “That’s what makes winning sweeter, you’ve got to lose a final to win a final I think. You appreciate it more when you’ve lost one and you’ve got to go back next time.”