If competition really is a sin, as the world's first billionaire JD Rockefeller supposedly remarked, then this week's Punchestown Festival could emerge as an unlikely oasis of virtue with Willie Mullins mostly preaching to the defeated.
It is six weeks since the man who has transformed the parameters of success in National Hunt racing took another momentous jump forward at Cheltenham.
Legacies have been carved out of trainers having 10 career winners at the most important racing festival of all. Mullins saddled 10 in four days, a new and previously almost unimaginable tally for a single week.
Such dominance never just happens in the first place and is certainly not maintained by taking things for granted
Now the bulk of the team that produced such a remarkable run of success is being readied for the finale to another jumps season in Ireland, which takes place over five days starting tomorrow.
Tipping Point: National on Easter Monday a Grand tradition worth preserving
Four years after Russian sportswashing, we're in for a repeat in Qatar
Tipping Point: The Ireland racing tree got a shake but has anything really fallen out
Tipping Point: Time for racing to unhitch its wagon from gambling sponsorship
After last year's behind closed doors festival, and cancellation in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the significance of up to 130,000 pouring through the gates at the Co Kildare venue will be lost on no one.
Momentum at Punchestown came to a shuddering halt because of Covid-19. The 2019 festival that ended with an all-time record-breaking crowd of 37,206 on the hugely successful “Family Day” fixture seems a very long time ago.
An astutely timed insurance cancellation policy left the track better placed than most to ride out the pandemic. Nevertheless, the festival provides Punchestown with 85 per cent of its annual business so it was a “new normal” nobody wanted.
Champion trainer
A lot has changed in those two years but one “old normal” likely to await all those attending and watching this week is going to be the primacy of Willie Mullins’s team.
Mullins will be crowned champion trainer for a 16th time at the weekend. His No. 1 rider Paul Townend is assured of being champion jockey once again. The trainer's son, Patrick, will be crowned champion amateur rider for a 14th time.
If Cheltenham is the ultimate gauge of jump racing’s pecking-order, then Mullins’s supremacy has been most clear cut on home ground at Punchestown. Never was that more obvious than last year’s festival.
Of the 40 races run in 2021, Mullins won 19. It is a strike-rate that is even more awesome considering how he didn’t contest eight of the 40. Some of those races are restricted. Others are over banks. Some are simply not good enough for his horses.
But in the big-money contests that make up the bulk of the €3.1 million in prizemoney up for grabs over the five days, and especially the dozen Grade 1 races, Mullins was once again the overwhelmingly dominant figure, winning 60 per cent of the races he contested.
The thing was how such an astonishing level of dominance was perceived as unremarkable. Yet again the strongest team in the game peaked at the right time to scoop the most valuable prizes in the most lucrative week of the year in Ireland. It was almost viewed as fait accompli.
That is unfair to the man at the centre of one of Irish sport’s greatest success stories. Such dominance never just happens in the first place and is certainly not maintained by taking things for granted. The relentless drive required may come coated in personal urbanity but is at the core.
Patrick Mullins summed up his father's ambition last week, alluding to 2016 when a famous dispute over training fees meant Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary took away his 60 horses, a move that even then brought to mind the old line about knowing the price of everything but not the value.
“Willie would’ve been in his late 50s, he’d have been champion trainer eight or nine times, it would have been very easy just to sit back and consolidate.
“But he didn’t. He went out and got more owners, got more horses, got more staff, got more problems and now we have more horses than we had before then.
“Being a good trainer is more than having fit horses. He’s well able to source good owners and he’s well able to source good horses for those owners and that’s the key.
“We have so many expensive horses coming into our yard every season. There’s new blood every year. He’s never sat back. He’s continually looking for the next crop of horses and the next crop of owners,” he said.
Financial clout
It was due acknowledgement of the link between identifying young talent and having the financial clout to acquire them.
But there is no contradiction in granting both that and how much of that talent is on the open market for other wealthy connections to buy too. Presuming it is coincidental how one man gets his hands on so many of the best presumes way too much.
The outcome is a phenomenon and a remarkable success story by any sporting measure.
It is also part of a problem for National Hunt racing. It is not Mullins’s problem. He has enough of his own maintaining such excellence. But this week’s action is likely to underline once more the competitive quandary at the heart of the sport.
Given the Cheltenham evidence, Mullins could reach unprecedented levels of dominance. Admiring such accomplishment will be easy, just as pushing away worries about such one-sidedness and its implications for the game generally will prove difficult to ignore.
The most stark evidence of the sport’s competition issue is at its greatest shop-window in Cheltenham, a festival increasingly diluted of the championship status it is famed for due to being padded out to four days.
Now it seems all but inevitable that the move to five days will take place in 2024.
That’s due to commercial imperatives for the Jockey Club who own Cheltenham and want to exploit public demand for its greatest attraction. But that demand is rooted in the unpredictability that comes with meaningful championship competition.
The five days at Punchestown could underscore even further the folly of going to five days at Cheltenham.
