Inside Track: Irish rout the home team in racing’s biggest showcase
Inside Track with Joe Carroll
They should change the name from Cheltenham Festival to Mullins’ Meeting. There aren’t many records the Carlow trainer hasn’t broken at the biggest National Hunt meeting in the world, and he was at it again at this year’s renewal. And yet....
Ten winners over the four days, bettering the total number of the entire British haul, equals his own record, which he set last year. But as he reflects on the week, two that got away will loom large.
They were the biggest races of the entire meeting, the Gold Cup and the Champions Hurdle. Galopin Des Champs, bidding for a third successive Gold Cup, may have finished second, but the champion turned in a below-par performance, starting at odds-on.
In relinquishing his Hurdle title, however, State Man emerged as the meeting’s unluckiest loser. Mullins’ horse was well clear going to the last, but failing to get high enough, fell, leaving outsider, Golden Ace, to come home alone.
Those hard-to-take defeats aside, Mullins underlined his brilliance with his ten winners. He was mob-handed in some of the races, fielding as many as eleven in Friday’s opener, which he won with a 100/1 chance.
His huge entry hasn’t gone down well with the home team. A British Grand National-winning trainer said that a stable’s number of runners in any race should be confined. He had Mullins in mind.
Maybe he’s not old enough to remember Michael Dickinson being responsible for the first five home in a Gold Cup, or, when David Pipe and Paul Nicholls were fighting it out for the Trainers’ Championship, one of them having multiple runners in the smallest of races in an effort to secure winners.
This being another Festival in which the home guard was routed, all but eight of the 28 winners going to trainers from this side of the Irish Sea, the cries are likely to get louder.
However, instead of concerning itself over the Irish dominance, the British establishment should seek an answer to how one of the top races on Wednesday failed to attract as much as one local runner.
Willie Mullins didn’t take all the Irish glory. JP McManus, that great supporter of Irish sport – remember his largesse last year, granting €1m to each of the 32 counties for the promotion of GAA – was once again leading owner, his green-and-gold colours carried to victory in seven races.
One of them was in the Gold Cup, Inothewayurthinkin (which to those who don’t understand how some horses are named, is another way of saying, I Know The Way You’re Thinking) lowering the colours of Galopin Des Champs.
McManus is known to spend huge amounts buying horses, but didn’t with this one. Something that should give him huge satisfaction is the fact that the Gold Cup winner was bred at his own stud in Martinstown, Co Limerick.
Gavin Cromwell has Inothewayurthinkin in his Co Meath yard, and by adding the Gold Cup to his successes, has now completed a cherished double, having trained the winner Champion Hurdle a few years ago with another McManus-owned horse.
A farrier by trade, having worked at Gordon Elliott’s stable, also in Meath, Cromwell has made a huge impact since taking out a licence. If Willie Mullins is ever to be knocked off his perch, the quiet-spoken Meathman could be the one to do it.
The win for Marine National in the Queen Mother Chase was engulfed in emotion. When the Kildare-trained horse won at the same meeting two years ago, he was ridden by Michael O’Sullivan, who lost his life in a last fence fall at Thurles a number of weeks back. The young man had a race run in his memory in the opening day of the festival.