There’s widespread giddy anticipation at what’s to come this Christmas although Willie Mullins’s expectation is due to one ‘present’ already chomping hay outside his back door.
You don’t associate giddiness with jump racing’s champion trainer. The man who has reset the parameters of success in a hard-nosed business cuts a much more urbane figure than that. But the way he talks about Facile Vega underlines how he looks to be a rare kind of gift.
A son of the record-breaking Cheltenham festival winning mare, Quevega, the unbeaten five-year-old gelding was a bumper champion before winning his sole start to date over flights earlier this month.
He jumps straight into Grade One company in Tuesday’s Paddy Power Future Champion Novice Hurdle at Leopardstown and will be at all but unbackable odds to win en route to more Cheltenham success in March. Right now, there is no more exciting horse in the sport.
Keeping hype under control is usually Mullins’s default move. But even before that jumping debut, the 66-year-old who has had superstar names such as Hurricane Fly and Faugheen through his hands admitted to Facile Vega being the best prospect he’s had in years.
He doesn’t row back from such exalted billing either. Even in the context of current talent such as the Gold Cup favourite Galopin Des Champs, Mullins doesn’t disguise his excitement about Facile Vega. He even couches it in timely Christmas language.
“His star is very bright at the moment. He is very good, but we don’t know how good. Most of the other horses that we have run, we have a fair idea of what their ability is; this fellow, we don’t know how good he is. He’s still, for want of a better phrase, an unopened package,” he said.
“We’ve got Galopin Des Champs there, Vauban, State Man: but if someone was to come down and give you one to take out from the yard, would you take a Galopin Des Champs, Vauban or Facile Vega?
“Facile has everything, size, scope, pedigree, there’s more left unopened there than the other horses,” he added.
Mullins has been training for 35 years and enjoyed major success around the globe from Japan to the US. Perhaps most importantly of all, he is the Cheltenham festival’s most successful ever figure with 88 winners, including a scarcely credible 10 last March alone.
So, there’s something almost reassuring about a single animal still managing to get a supreme professional’s pulse going.
Another kind of ‘old normal’ will come when a Christmas tradition resumes on St Stephen’s Day as Irish racing throws open it’s gates to holiday racegoers for the first time in three years.
Racing behind closed doors filled the gap during two festival periods blighted by Covid-19 although it was a hollow consolation in terms of atmosphere on the ground.
Economic anxiety casts a pall this time, but not enough to prevent the sport dressing up in its best bib and tucker and attracting the public back to some of its most popular festival dates.
Leopardstown and Limerick start four days of action each while Down Royal makes Monday the busiest single day’s action of the year.
A lot has changed in the last three years but not Mullins’s status as the sport’s single biggest winner. His Christmas delivery was a holiday fixture long before the pandemic. It continued through it too. Last year he saddled 15 festive winners. In 2020 it was 16, with 13 of them at Leopardstown alone.
Once again, picking the Mullins horse is going to be the default move for many casual racegoers tempted by the Christmas festival atmosphere. Getting them back at other times is nowhere near as automatic.
With the atmosphere at many other meetings increasingly low-key due to lack of boots on the ground, major dates such as Christmas have become an even more important shop window for the sport.
“Since I suppose the Celtic Tiger crash, a lot less people are going racing midweek. Then we had Covid on top of that.
“It does seem to be veering towards a festival thing and big local days like the Thyestes at Gowran. The days of the twice a week racegoer – Thursday and Saturday as it used to be – are well behind us,” Mullins conceded.
The irony is that those not bothered to go racing watch daily action on TV which provides tracks with lucrative media rights income often ploughed back into facilities for a public not there.
From a wider perspective, Mullins insists it is an arrangement that pays off, particularly in comparison to cross-channel.
“Racing has been very well compensated by the TV rights. The tracks are doing a lot better because of it, getting more money out of the game than depending on the gate.
“If you look at the English model where tracks are allowed do what they can, and they have to fend for themselves, it hasn’t improved their programme.
“I think maybe their standard of horses has declined and the prize money has declined because of it, whereas in Ireland we have a better structure,” he said.
Those going through the turnstiles this Christmas have the chance once again to see first-hand quality action. And once more Willie Mullins is set to be centre-stage, this time with a singular looking star turn.
