Dec 17,2024
As the pre-eminent National Hunt trainer of his time, and having landed almost everything worth winning over timber and birch, it perhaps shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the prize Willie Mullins covets most for his trophy cabinet at Closutton is the Melbourne Cup.
An annus mirabilis for Ireland's perennial champion trainer culminated in him becoming the first Irish-based jumps trainer since Vincent O'Brien in the 1953-54 season to be crowned the leading handler across the Irish Sea.
Winning a second Grand National at Aintree went a long way to achieving that feat, as did saddling nine winners at the Cheltenham Festival, where Mullins became the first trainer to saddle 100 winners at the meeting.
One race that didn't go to plan in a stellar year, was the Melbourne Cup, with a twin-pronged assault on 'the race that stops a nation' resulting in a fifth-place finish for Absurde and Vauban coming home six places further back.
Sojourns Down Under in early November have become a staple in the Mullins calendar. A number of his runners have been in the shake-up, without getting their heads in front, and Max Dynamite went agonisingly close in 2015 and 2017 when finishing second and third.
The pain of loss hurts more than the joy derived from victory. It's how humans are hardwired. For Mullins, the near-misses fuel his future ambitions.
"Even though we're predominantly jump racing, we always have a selection of Flat horses.
"It's fantastic to be able to go to places like Royal Ascot, York and on to Melbourne, and to have runners at those big festivals.
"That's what keeps you going and gives you something to aim for every year.
"The Melbourne Cup, because of the nature of our yard - we don't have two-year-olds and three-year-olds and Classic horses - but we have older horses that can run on the Flat.
"That's probably the world's biggest race that we can achieve in from our base."
While setting records and passing milestones have become regular occurrences in his hegemony of the jumps game, even Mullins admitted to a degree of incredulity as to how last season panned out.
"If someone told me at the start of the year what was going to happen, I would have said that's a Disney script, that couldn't happen," he said.
The fact that Mullins didn't launch an all-out assault on the champion trainer title in Britain until after Aintree backs up his assertion that he viewed such an outcome as highly improbable.
However, he came mighty close previously, with Paul Nicholls prevailing in that particular skirmish at the end of the 2015-16 season.
The pain of coming so close to the title in 2016 may have diminished with the passage of time, but the ultimate salve to soothe those battle scars was going one better this time around.
"I think in 2016 we went down to the third-last race at Sandown on the last day of the season," he recalled.
"That was tough coming home, but you know the old saying in sport, 'you've got to lose a final to win one'.
"We had a good chance after winning the Grand National this year. We had a fantastic Cheltenham and then we went over to Aintree and said we'd have to win a few other races, and hopefully win the Grand National.
"So we had to commit a lot of our horses to Aintree and they won, thankfully.
"Then Paul [Townend] rode I Am Maximus to win the Grand National, which put us in a position to have a real good go at it.
"David Casey, who does all my race planning, I just said to him 'enter everything up, enter the yard cat if you have to!'
"We visited places we will probably never visit again all over England, Wales and Scotland, entering horses and trying to gain prize money together.
"It just worked, but we weren't going to leave any stone unturned."
