Champion Irish trainer has Vauban as the short-price favourite for Tuesday morning’s race
Willie Mullins is looking for his first Melbourne Cup winner 20 years on from the first runner he sent to Australia. Photograph: Alan Crowhurst/Getty Imagessent his first runner to the Melbourne Cup, one of the biggest flat races in the world. Holy Orders was a talented horse, but his moods had an adolescent leaning, and after he landed in Australia he refused to break into a gallop in his morning paces.
So, he kept coming back. Not every year, but when he believed he had something suitable. How close has he come? Fourth. Third. Second. In the early hours of Tuesday morning Mullins will saddle two runners in the race, and one of them, Vauban, is the short-priced favourite. Tom Dreaper’s record of nine successive jumps trainers titles in Ireland had stood for decades; Mullins is currently at 15 in-a-row. Are you still counting? Seven years ago, Gordon Elliott forced the title race to the last week of the jumps season, and equalled Mullins’ record for 193 winners.
That mystery is not a function of distance. In conversation over the years the people who work closest with Mullins have confessed their ignorance too. At close range, they see everything Mullins does, without seeing everything he sees. David Casey and Ruby Walsh and Mullins’ son Patrick can tell you exactly how the horses are prepared, but it would be pointless for any other trainer to plagiarise their methods and hope for the same outcomes.
The part of Mullins we sometimes overlook is his competitiveness. In team sports you cannot miss it, and even amongst Mullins’ peers their emotions sometimes get the better of them and they can’t conceal how much they want to win. Mullins, though, is not like that at the racecourse. His perfect manners and his even mood and his ready smile are not corroded by the dirty business of winning. The competitiveness is left for us to infer.
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