Mullins Favourite For British Title After National Triumph With I Am Maximus

   I Am Maximus (Fr) (Authorized {Ire}) produced one of the most impressive Grand National-winning performances in some time to propel Willie Mullins to the head of the British Trainers' Championship.

Owned by JP McManus and ridden by Paul Townend, last year's Irish Grand National hero represented winner number two in the Aintree showpiece for Mullins, who sent out Hedgehunter (Ire) (Montelimar) to success in 2005.

Returned the 7-1 co-favourite, I Am Maximus stormed clear of Delta Work (Fr) (Network {Ger}) in second with former Gold Cup winner Minella Indo (Ire) (Beat Hollow {GB}) back in third.

Betfair reacted to the victory by making Ireland's dominant jumps trainer an 8-15 favourite to clinch a breakthrough British Championship ahead of Paul Nicholls and Dan Skelton at 2-1 and 5-1, respectively.

Mullins said, “I thought Paul was super on him as I'm not sure the horse was giving him a lot of help on the way round and I could see him just minding him the whole way round.

“We saw that last year in the Irish National and he has supreme confidence in the horse and he always has that bit in the tank. When he was cut off going to the second last or the last, you saw him coming out around and just biding his time waiting for his challenge to deliver.

“I could see Paul's body language and he was happy, so I was happy then. I don't think I said anything until he got over the last and then I let go (and gave him a cheer).

“I'm buzzing here now at the moment and it's huge. As far as I know our team is back in full order with no injuries or anything and I'm happy that we have a full complement of horses and riders coming back in.”

Mullins was winning the race for a second time but it was a first Aintree National victory for Townend.

The rider said, “I ended up being first down to the first to give him a look and as he got to the Melling Road he started backing off so it wasn't a great start, but the volume of horses pushed him down over the first three and he got a bit careful on the second circuit but I was trying to conserve as much as I could as well.

“He didn't get the clearest run from the second last to the last, but it kind of helped me and I had a feeling when I got him out he was going to start motoring in the clear air and he did.”

Townend added, “The ones in front of me, I'm sure they weren't looking for me but I had them well in my sights. I was hoping he would respond like I thought he would.

“Gold Cups are Gold Cups and Grade 1s are hard to win. But Grand Nationals are just a bit different. You just need so much luck and I can't believe it, I'm a lucky boy.”

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Cheltenham Was Always About the Horses and Britain Has Lost Ground 

When I started covering the Cheltenham Festival in the late 1980s it was still a place of myth and legend: whiskey priests, all-night card schools, hopeful (but not expectant) Irish pilgrimages, farmers with chances of winning a race and wince-inducing whip-use up the hill.

It was a place chiefly for aficionados – the county set and jump racing hardcore, leavened with once-a-year urban tweedies who loved the racing and knew what it meant to watch Dawn Run win both a Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup.

A place, in other words, for disciples, with newsworthy battles between rails bookmakers and big hitters, which the outside world peered at excitedly but fleetingly. The Cheltenham Festival made the front pages because it was edgy, rooted, fragrant, intense and magical. It united the human and animal kingdoms like no other sport. The Grand National was a national ritual, but it didn't shine a light on our culture the way Cheltenham did.

We've come a long way since then. The modern Cheltenham is entertainment industry giant, mass market day out, commercial behemoth, and these days, a place of plunder for Irish yards, principally that of Willie Mullins, who won nine of this year's 27 races, including the two defining events with State Man (Champion Hurdle) and Galopin Des Champs (Gold Cup).

More than ever, Cheltenham is subject to modern economic reality. On the track we see a concentration of power into a few hands and a switch to recruitment, scouting and academy-based success. This, aside from the training skill, is the foundation of Mullins's success – a  pre-emptive odds-loading in his favour. An astonishing tally of 103 Festival winners suggests Mullins' networking has caught many of his rivals cold.

Ireland's latest training win over GB yards by 18-9 in the Prestbury Cup has caused alarm at the British Horseracing Authority, whose chief executive Julie Harrington said in a statement the morning after the Gold Cup…

“I have no doubt that the men and women who train horses here in Britain are more than a match for their Irish counterparts. However, they need the ammunition and at present the balance of power and the best horses are going to our colleagues in Ireland, and in particular one yard…..
“However, the Irish domination of the Grade 1 races this week has illustrated that the issue is becoming more pronounced and more damaging for the sport on both sides of the Irish sea.

“Put simply, the rate of decline of Jump racing in Britain at the top end has outstripped the measures that have been put in place to tackle it. We must do more, more quickly, and in a more coordinated and decisive manner if we are going to restore British Jump racing to the standing at which it belongs.”

In other words – it's an emergency. Off the track meanwhile Cheltenham can no longer expect legions of revellers to arrive on autopilot. Like the Ryder Cup in golf, the Festival became drunk on the notion of infinite expansion and untouchable popularity. To the addicted, the last race on Friday triggers a kind of melancholia about the length of the wait for the next Festival to come around. But not even the imperishable charm of that great Cotswold playground can guarantee its survival as an annual must-go event.

First, the experience. Muddy and gridlocked car parks are not to the modern consumer's taste. Nor is a £7.50 pint you have to queue for 20 minutes to get. Nor is a lack of places to sit. Nor, you might argue, are small fields or the Mullins dominance. It's hard to disentangle anxiety about Cheltenham's importance as a shop window from wider worries about the health of National Hunt racing.

Cheltenham is not to blame for much of this. Climate change and £700 hotel room rates are not their fault. Sport's post-Covid spike is over. The racecourse is promising to freeze ticket prices and stop car parks becoming swamps. They insist there is “no complacency.”

Grumbles about the cost of food and drink can be heard across all British sports. And each pays a price for the shambles that our rail network has become. Cost of living pressures are not just Radio 4 news headlines. They force choices on people: what to stick with, what to give up.

In that context the drop in attendance at this year's Festival was relatively modest. Crowds were down 11,000 from 240,603 in 2023 to 229,370 this year. But if the lesson is that Cheltenham will have to sing for its supper like every other major sporting event then the signs of a downturn in public interest may turn out to be cathartic.

There is a deeply optimistic note in what we saw this year. For some, Cheltenham is about the gambling, drinking, eating and cavorting. For my money it was always about the horses. The romance end of the market survives. Fiona Needham winning the Foxhunters' with a £2,400 horse (Sine Nomine) 22 years after she won the race as a jockey was a throwback tale.

And for all the misgivings about Cheltenham becoming the Willie Mullins show, he sent some magnificent horses out for our entertainment: State Man, Ballyburn, Fact To File and above all Galopin Des Champs, whose victory in the hundredth anniversary Gold Cup was a thing of beauty. That's what Cheltenham is, right there.

 

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Galopin Des Champs Seals Golden Week For Mullins, Again

CHELTENHAM, UK–Believe it or not, Willie Mullins drew a blank on day three of the 2024 Cheltenham Festival, with Capodanno (Fr) (Manduro {Ger}) and Jade De Grugy (Fr) (Doctor Dino {Fr}) faring best of their trainer's 11 runners on that card when finishing fourth in their respective races.

Twenty-four hours without a winner at the Festival is a long time in Willie's world, the one in which he hit the target six times across the first two days of the meeting. Thankfully for him after Thursday's 'drought', there was a strong case to be made that the team he'd assembled for day four was his most formidable yet, certainly numerically as his 25 runners on the card surpassed the 20 he saddled on Wednesday. It also took the total number of horses he ran this week to a scarcely believable 75.

There was a time when having 75 runners at the Cheltenham Festival in a lifetime would have been a notable achievement for a trainer, but Mullins has a habit of making the extraordinary look ordinary, with no better example than the milestone he celebrated on Wednesday when saddling his 100th winner at the meeting.

As for extraordinary equine talent, there are few better examples around at present than Galopin Des Champs (Fr), who led the Mullins battalions into war on Friday when tasked with trying to defend the G1 Cheltenham Gold Cup crown he won so impressively in 2023.

It looked a deep Gold Cup on paper with six other top-level winners featuring in an 11-strong field but, just like his trainer, Galopin Des Champs is capable of making remarkable feats of brilliance look rather routine, arriving at Cheltenham this year with eight Grade 1 wins to his name already and being backed into odds-on favouritism as if a ninth was in no doubt whatsoever.

Any punters who took the short odds wouldn't have had too many anxious moments in the race itself, bar the presence of the loose Fastorslow (Fr) (Saint Des Saints {Fr})–who unseated J. J. Slevin early on the final circuit–as the field kicked for home on the run from four out.

From there Galopin Des Champs gradually moved up to press L'Homme Presse (Fr) (Diamond Boy {Fr}) at the head of affairs and it was all but over as a contest when he moved to the front with a typically fluent jump two out, ultimately winning by three and a half lengths from Gerri Colombe (Fr) (Saddler Maker {Ire}) having drawn right away on the approach to the last.

“I just think he put himself in the superstar category, to do what he did in the way that he did it,” Mullins said of the winner afterwards. “I think we have to say, we're coming back next year to try to win a third one if we can. He has the ability to do it–he just has to stay sound, I think.”

The eight-year-old was providing both Mullins and jockey Paul Townend with their fourth Gold Cup victories apiece, having matched the two wins of the stable's Al Boum Photo (Fr) (Buck's Boum {Fr}) in 2019 and 2020. Mullins is also unique now as the only trainer to have saddled two different multiple winners of the sport's blue riband.

As for Galopin Des Champs, he too is totally unique in being the only progeny of any real note produced by the late Timos (Ger), who put up one of his best efforts as a racehorse when filling the runner-up spot in the 2010 G2 Grand Prix de Chantilly for trainer Thierry Doumen.

Doumen stood Timos himself as a stallion before selling him to Tunisia at a time when Galopin Des Champs was yet to arrive on the scene to put his sire's name in lights. Timos later moved to Libya where he sadly died, with the circumstances of his death being described as “shady” by Doumen when speaking to The Nick Luck Daily Podcast in March last year.

Galopin Des Champs might well be the first and last Cheltenham Festival sired by Timos, but the winner of the St. James's Place Festival Challenge Cup Open Hunters' Chase that followed, Sine Nomine (GB), came from a much more familiar source in the shape of Haras de la Tuilerie resident Saint Des Saints (Fr).

Already twice on the scoreboard on Thursday with Monmiral (Fr) and Protektorat (Fr), Saint Des Saints's tally of three winners saw him share bragging rights among the leading stallions at this year's Festival with Flemensfirth, who was represented by the Grade 1 winners Ballyburn (Ire) and Grey Dawning (Ire), plus Ben Pauling's TrustATrader Plate Handicap Chase hero Shakem Up'Arry (Ire).

Dual champion sire Flemensfirth was a big loss to the Coolmore National Hunt ranks when he died in May 2023, having been retired from active stud duties in 2020, and so too Milan (GB) when he passed in 2022. Champion National Hunt sire himself in the 2019/20 season, Milan added to his list of Festival winners in this year's finale as Better Days Ahead (Ire)–a £350,000 purchase at the 2022 Tattersalls Cheltenham Festival Sale–ran out a determined winner of the Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys' Handicap Hurdle for Gordon Elliott and promising young rider Danny Gilligan.

G1 Stayers' Hurdle-winning trainer Elliott finished the meeting with three winners having also struck in the G1 Albert Bartlett Novices' Hurdle earlier on Friday's card with Stellar Story (Ire). By Shantou–the leading sire at last year's Festival with two winners– the Gigginstown House Stud-owned Stellar Story was another six-figure purchase at the 2022 Tattersalls Cheltenham Festival Sale when selling for £310,000.

Grange Stud's Walk In The Park (Ire) is the standout name among the stallions still plying their trade on the Coolmore National Hunt roster and his two winners at this year's Festival were notable for both being out of the same mare, Sway (Fr) (Califet {Fr}), who was a Listed winner over hurdles at Auteuil as a three-year-old.

Having subsequently raced in Britain in the familiar silks of J. P. McManus, Sway is now proving herself a prolific producer for her powerful owner with five winners from six foals to have raced. Inothewayurthinkin (Ire) looked potentially the pick of them so far when running away with Thursday's Fulke Walwyn Kim Muir Challenge Cup Amateur Jockeys' Handicap Chase, though his full-sister Limerick Lace (Ire) might have something say about that after she led home a one-two for McManus when seeing off Dinoblue (Fr) (Doctor Dino {Fr}) to win the G2 Mrs Paddy Power Mares' Chase on Friday's card. Both winners were trained by Gavin Cromwell.

McManus also won the G1 JCB Triumph Hurdle which kicked off the final day of the meeting with the Mullins-trained Majborough (Fr). Like Timos, Majborough's sire, Martinborough (Jpn), might be a new name to many National Hunt enthusiasts, a Japanese Group 3 winner who is based at Haras de la Baie in France. He's certainly thrown up a good one in Majborough, though, a four-year-old who had previously been described as a Gold Cup horse of the future by Mullins and certainly looked a horse with plenty of talent when overhauling stablemate Kargese (Fr) (Jeu St Eloi {Fr}) to win the premier Grade 1 event for juveniles.

“He's a chaser, isn't he?” said Mullins after the victory. “When he came into the yard and they said he was our Triumph Hurdle horse, I said I thought he was a Gold Cup horse, a three-mile chaser. He's very 'trained' at the moment, a bit angular, like all the French horses. But when he comes in from a summer's grass, he will be some beast.”

That, of course, was winner number 101 at the Festival for Mullins, who wasted no time adding to his unprecedented tally in the BetMGM County Handicap Hurdle as Absurde (Fr) (Fastnet Rock {Aus}) finished best of all to deny Dan Skelton's L'Eau Du Sud (Fr) (Lord Du Sud {Fr}).

It was a rare moment of agony in an otherwise jubilant week for Skelton and it was rather fitting that it should be provided by Mullins. The pair topped the training charts at the end of the Festival with nine wins for Mullins to Skelton's four, a British stable fighting back but just not able to match the might of the Closutton machine which has now churned out 103 Festival winners–and counting–with few better than the exceptional dual Gold Cup hero Galopin Des Champs.

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A Mullins Treble Puts Cheltenham Century in Reach

CHELTENHAM, UK — The biggest cheer all day at Cheltenham came from the Ascot crowd. Sir Francis Brooke, first Her Majesty's and now His Majesty's Representative at Ascot was engulfed by back-slappers and well-wishers as the horse he owns with Richard Pilkington, Chianti Classico (Ire) (Shantou {Ire}), ground his way through the extended three miles of the Ultima Handicap Chase to provide the sole strike for Britain on a day dominated – predictably – by Willie Mullins. 

Chianti Classico's trainer Kim Bailey has had his share of Cheltenham glory but those high days were almost 30 years ago when, in 1995, Alderbrook (GB) took the Champion Hurdle followed two days later by the victory of Master Oats (GB) in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the maestro Norman Williamson in the saddle for both. 

That was in the days when it seemed that the spoils were more evenly spread, and Bailey claiming two of the championship races in the same year was big news. Now, Mullins does that with regularity and the winner's enclosure on the opening day of the Cheltenham Festival was again frequently occupied by his horses.

There seemed little doubt, barring the vagaries of luck in running, that State Man (Fr) (Doctor Dino {Fr}) would carry off the G1 Unibet Champion Hurdle once Constitution Hill (GB) (Blue Bresil {Fr}) had been ruled out last week. The latter is the only horse who has been able to tame State Man in his last 12 races, when, on this day last year, Constitution Hill handed him a nine-length drubbing in this same race. 

“You've got to turn up to win a Champion Hurdle. We turned up,” said Mullins, unable to resist a a gentle sideswipe at those constantly comparing his fifth Champion Hurdle winner to the rather more flamboyant absentee. 

“There's no wow factor with State Man,” he said of the seven-year-old. “And you don't go 'wow' when you look at him either, but he does what it says on the tin. He's that type of horse. It's very hard to be wow in that ground, but he's a good solid, sound horse and he just gives his running every time.”

There is a rather bigger wow attached to the lovely five-year-old mare Lossiemouth (Fr) (Great Pretender {Ire}), who prowled round the parade ring, cruised around racecourse, making light work of the heavy turf, then returned to claim her second prize on Cheltenham's main stage. She has only been beaten once in her life and we will surely see her in the Champion Hurdle in years to come but, having taken last year's G1 JCB Triumph Hurdle it was plainly the right decision to keep her among her own sex in the G1 Close Brothers Mares' Hurdle. The sheer depth of that race in recent years is testament to the fact that it is doing exactly what is was introduced to do, and that is to encourage owners to buy and race mares.

“You can say anything you want to in hindsight,” said Lossiemouth's owner Rich Ricci. “We had a plan and we stuck to it. Hopefully we'll be able to do it next year. We've won the Mares' [Hurdle], it's a Grade 1 and I'm delighted.”

It was in fact double delight for Ricci and his wife Susannah, whose colours had already been borne to victory by Gaelic Warrior (Ger) (Maxios {GB}), who had started the ball rolling for Mullins with victory in the G1 Arkle Novices' Chase. This provided a rare top-level winner over fences for the breeding operation of the Niarchos family. He'd been sold by them for only €9,000 as a yearling in Germany and thus became the first of two BBAG September Yearling Sale graduates to strike at Cheltenham on Tuesday. He is one of the standout performers, along with former Triumph Hurdle winner Quilixios (GB), for his sire Maxios, and his breeding is Niarchos through and through, with his first two dams and damsire Hernando (Fr) having also been bred by the family. 

Incidentally, lovers of racing trivia may recall that Maxios's half-brother, the Arc winner Bago (Fr), was responsible for the only horse ever to have carried the Niarchos colours on a Henry Cecil runner at Cheltenham when his son Plato (Jpn) won the 2011 St Patrick's Day Derby under Lorna Fowler, whose first runner as a trainer in the Champion Hurdle this year, Colonel Mustard (Ger) ran an honourable fifth.

It is now the norm for Irish-trained horses to have the upper hand at Cheltenham, and Henry de Bromhead, Joseph O'Brien and Emmet Mullins also wrote their names on the first-day scoresheet.

First blood went the way of de Bromhead and Rachael Blackmore in the G1 Sky Bet Supreme Novices' Hurdle when Slade Steel (Ire) outbattled Mystical Power (Ire) up the hill. The latter has the bloodlines to excel on the Flat or over jumps, as he is by Galileo (Ire) out of the brilliant Champion Hurdler Annie Power (Ire), but it was Galileo's son Telescope (Ire) who provided the winner. Though born in Ireland at Ballincurrig House Stud, Slade Steel was bred by British breeder Dena Merson, who joins an elite group to have bred a winner at both the Cheltenham Festival and Royal Ascot. The two horses are related, too, as the 2008 Ascot Stakes winner Missoula (Ire) (Kalanisi {Ire}) is a half-sister to Slade Steel's dam Mariet (GB) (Dr Fong). 

The cousins Joseph O'Brien and JJ Slevin combined for their second joint-Festival win with Lark In The Mornin (Ger) in the Boodles Juvenile Handicap Hurdle. The son of Soldier Hollow (GB) may not be one of the main poster boys for the breeze-up sales but he adds an extra level of versatility to the list of graduates from that division, having been bought at BBAG by Tom Whitehead for €28,000 and resold through his Powerstown Stud for 130,000gns at the Tattersalls Guineas Sale. Also the winner of Listowel mile maiden on debut at two, Lark In The Mornin was bred by Gestut Hof Ittlingen out of Loyalty Ger), a mare by their G1 Japan Cup winner Lando (Ger).

Emmet Mullins, who runs his Grand National winner Noble Yeats (Ire) (Yeats {Ire}) in Thursday's G1 Paddy Power Stayers' Hurdle, claimed Tuesday's finale, named in honour of his grandmother, who died last month. The Maureen Mullins National Hunt Challenge Cup saw the widest-margin winner of the day when JP McManus's Corbetts Cross (Ire) (Gamut {Ire}) shot clear by 17 lengths in the hands of Derek O'Connor.

“It was a great honour and a privilege for The Jockey Club to name the race after Mrs Mullins, granny, and it's extra special to win it,” said Mullins.

But the day really belonged to Emmet's Uncle Willie, who, with Lossiemouth, recorded a 97th Festival win. Don't bet against him getting a hundred up before the week is out, and there would perhaps be no more appropriate way to do so than in the hundredth running of the Cheltenham Gold Cup on Friday. Conveniently, and totally unsurprisingly, Willie Mullins has the favourite for that race, too.

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