Even for a man who once threatened to force Ryanair passengers to pay to use the toilet, the penny-pinching logic that apparently persuaded Michael O’Leary to quit the Willie Mullins stable seems surprisingly short-sighted. O’Leary is one of the richest men in Ireland. No matter how much Mullins has hiked his fees, it could never be the kind of money that O’Leary would miss, yet he has still chosen to walk away from the most successful stable in the game.
In the general astonishment that followed Wednesday’s announcement, most attention was on horses that Mullins has lost, including proven top-class performers such as Apple’s Jade, Don Poli and Valseur Lido. There will surely be some future stars among the novices and bumper horses leaving the yard. Mullins can expect to see horses that were in his stable on Tuesday morning winning Grade Ones for rival trainers for several seasons to come.
But O’Leary is a loser as well. Horses are creatures of habit and some of them will take time to adapt to different surroundings and new regimes and for any owner playing the big-money game that National Hunt racing has now become, all the effort, expense and obsession is directed towards four days at Cheltenham in March. Mullins has no equals when it comes to bringing horses to their peak at the Festival.
O’Leary must know as well as anyone that when a racehorse owner starts to worry too keenly about the bills, it is probably time to find a new hobby. His sudden departure from the Mullins stable must be down to more than mere euros and cents and the prime candidate, as it is so often when successful people fall out, is ego.
Where would racing be without the super-rich – men, almost exclusively – and their urgent need to wave their wads at each other? No one can buy their way into the England football team or the men’s singles final at Wimbledon, but you can buy your way into the winner’s enclosure at Cheltenham. The ego-boost that follows is priceless.
From a trainer’s point of view, however, it also feeds the monster. Mullins has achieved many things in recent years, winning championship races and titles and setting records that may stand for decades to come, but one of his greatest triumphs may have been to manage expectations in a yard with not one or two, but three major owners: O’Leary, Graham Wylie and Rich Ricci.
“Training horses is the easy bit of my job,” a well-known Flat trainer once told me, after a horse that he had steered through handicaps to win some very valuable prizes had been removed from his yard. “Training some of the owners, that’s the really difficult part.”
Apple’s Jade, perhaps the most exciting of all the horses to leave the Mullins yard, illustrates the sort of problems that can arise. The four-year-old took the Grade One juvenile hurdle at Aintree in April by an astonishing 41 lengths, but is an 8-1 chance for the Champion Hurdle in a market headed by two Ricci-owned horses, Faugheen and Annie Power, the champions of 2015 and 2016 respectively. It is possible that O’Leary would want to see Apple’s Jade in the Champion Hurdle this season rather than next. From the stable’s point of view, however, it could make more sense to send her to the Mares’ Hurdle next March, and the Champion 12 months later.
What it boils down to is that an owner like O’Leary will always be happiest when he is the undisputed top dog in the yard. First among equals isn’t enough. In the long run, it may be best for O’Leary, Mullins and racing that they have gone their separate ways, because anything that makes racing more competitive can only be good for the sport.
