FEATURE WILLIE MULLINS
he answered every call that Paul asked of him. It’s very easy to say things in the autumn, but when the spring comes, you’re prime for looking a fool when he doesn’t actually stay and people were doubting him. Thankfully, he answered every call, but we did feel the pressure and it was a huge relief.” Mullins is a man who is always looking forward, so it is perhaps fitting that four of his six winners last term came from the novices. Having the likes of El Fabiolo and Impaire Et Passe at his disposal means that it’s surely only a matter of time before Closutton hits that milestone of three figures – though Mullins reveals that it is a milestone he is happy for others to keep track of for him. He says: “It’s something that people will be keeping tabs on, but we go there just hoping to get one winner on the board on the first day. It’s fantastic when we can do that. Then anything else is a bonus. “Numbers like that are not something we’ve ever thought about, because I don’t think anyone ever considers them. When we started out, numbers like that weren’t achievable, but the present day is a different scenario to 25 or 30 years ago. You’ve got the extra day now, which has helped, while yards are much bigger than they were when we started out. “I’m sure people will catch up. That’s the thing about statistics – they’re always broken. Every sport is always moving forwards – so I’m sure that even if we hit the century, someone will beat us!” He may be closing in on a century of winners, but it has very much been a slow build to the top for Mullins, whose tally of Festival winners stood at just 21 at the end of the 2010 Festival. It means he has racked up a scarcely believable 73 winners since then, but when asked whether he could pinpoint a precise moment when things took off, Mullins instead attributes his success to a whole host of factors. “There were things like Faugheen and Hurricane Fly coming along and people like Rich Ricci and Joe and Marie Donnelly joining the yard. They were all milestones in terms of how the yard improved,” he explains. “Every year we’d make improvements to things like the gallops that you hope are going to bring the whole operation forwards. Most of those things worked, so it has been very much a slow process. “There are lots of different things, which go all the way back to the beginning. If you look at Tourist Attraction, he showed that we could have a winner at Cheltenham, while Florida Pearl showed that Tourist Attraction wasn’t a fluke! “We just keep trying to do the same thing every year with a little bit of improvement. At the end of each season, we sit down and try to look at what we did right and what we did wrong and go from there.”
Florida Pearl returning to the winners enclosure under Richard Dunwoody after winning the 1998 Royal & Sunalliance Chase
One moment Mullins does highlight is the emergence of the legendary mare Quevega, with whom he won the Mares’ Hurdle a record six times in a row from 2009 to 2014. The art of preparing a horse for The Festival is something Mullins would master with the mare, and it would ultimately lead to him cracking the ultimate formula – sealing back-to-back Cheltenham Gold Cup victories with Al Boum Photo in 2019 and 2020. He says: “Quevega was fantastic, and of course, going back every year with her gave us the confidence that we could prepare one for Cheltenham, as we just kept her for that. “We wouldn’t have had too many winners at the Festival when she won it the first time and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, we can win this again next year,’ and we did and she just kept doing it. “If you ask any owner if they could have just one win the whole year, the answer will always be going to Cheltenham and that’s what we did. “Having a horse like that and preparing her just gives the whole yard confidence that we can do it, so in that sense just having Quevega was huge for us.”
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