Another day at Punchestown produced another landmark for Willie Mullins on Friday as he equalled his record of 13 winners at a single Punchestown Festival with 11 races still to be run. Faugheen’s defeat of his stablemate Arctic Fire in the feature race, the Punchestown Champion Hurdle, also moved Mullins to the verge of becoming the first Irish trainer to win €4m in a single season, a record that duly fell when Nichols Canyon won the Champion Novice Hurdle 35 minutes later.
Faugheen’s victory was emblematic of Mullins’ year as a whole, as he set off in front and then steadily poured on the power all the way to the line, his complete dominance apparent throughout.
The brilliant Champion Hurdle winner was a 1-6 chance, so an eight-length victory could be seen as no more than expected, but for Mullins the 10th victory of Faugheen’s unbeaten career to date was as impressive a display as he has seen from his horse.
“I don’t think Ruby held back. He jumped out and he was applying pressure from the start,” a jubilant Mullins said. “There were no tactics involved today. He just wanted to go and win the race. He had Arctic Fire to beat on the book and he wasn’t on the bridle at any stage and, when he’s not on the bridle, you know you’re going some pace.
“Ruby kept applying the speed from the front and didn’t let Arctic Fire get into it. It was very gutsy by Ruby. He was afraid of Arctic Fire’s [finishing speed] and he was drawing his fire from a long way out.”
Mullins’ record-breaking exploits at Punchestown come at the end of what has been, even by his remarkable and dominant standards, an extraordinary season. Domestically the bare numbers are scarcely credible. Before the start of racing on Friday he had saddled 525 horses in Ireland during the 2014-15 season, of which 181 were winners, a strike rate of almost precisely one in three.
He had sent out 90 runners-up too, earning a total of €3.7m for his owners, while his return to a level stake is the stuff of punters’ wildest fantasies. Mullins saddles many short-priced favourites, such as Un De Sceaux and Douvan, winners of Grade One races here this week at odds of 1-10 and 1-6 respectively, but his horses win with such consistency that anyone staking a single euro on all 525 would have banked a clear profit of nearly €50 over the course of the season. At a time when 3% is seen as a decent return on a savings account, the Bank of Mullins is paying 9%.
And that is just in Ireland. In Britain, where the 2014-15 season is now complete, Mullins sent out only 16 winners but, since eight of those were at the Cheltenham Festival – a record for any trainer – he finished fourth in the British trainers’ championship with nearly £1.4m in prize money. David Pipe, who sent out 116 winners, and Jonjo O’Neill, who saddled 104, were among the rivals with three-figure strings left trailing in the Mullins wake.
Mullins also made it into the top five in Britain’s prize money for the first time despite sending only a handful of runners across the water before the Festival meeting in March. Had he set out to target more of the Grade One events earlier in the season, he could well have finished ahead of Nicky Henderson and Philip Hobbs in second place.
Ireland’s Grade One and Grade Two events were seen as a more useful and productive source of winners for the yard this season. With the strength and depth of the stable apparently growing each year, however, could it be that one day Mullins will be the champion on both sides of the Irish Sea?
Mullins is already quoted as the third-favourite at 10-1 with William Hill for the 2015-16 trainers’ title in Britain and said after winning the novice handicap chase here with Blood Cotil – an 11-1 chance to boost further his level-stakes return – that he expects to increase the number of horses he sends to Britain.
“I’d imagine that the way things are going now we will have more runners in England,” Mullins said. “I don’t like travelling them too early before Cheltenham but I can imagine we will have to, if we want to try to keep them apart.”
