A few weeks ago, the Racing Post asked Patrick Mullins to interview Gordon Elliott, the only threat to his father’s dominance. In Game of Thrones, Mullins would have been taken out by a deadeye archer on the castle walls as he arrived on horseback, but Elliott invited him into his kingdom and showed him everything.
Elliott has visited Willie Mullins’s yard too. Patrick says that Elliott bought a stable tour at a charity auction. The champion trainer had no mind to hide anything.
For both of them, transparency is not a trick. Training racehorses is a niche science now with a vast hinterland of common knowledge, none of which accounts for Mullins and Elliott. It is easy to find witnesses to their genius, and alight on ways to describe it, but nobody understands it.
“You can’t put your finger on it,” said Ted Walsh once. “Whether it’s a singer or an actor or a playwright there’s something there that makes some people special and no one knows what it is. Gordon has it, Aidan [O’Brien] has it, Willie Mullins has it.”
The chemistry between Mullins and Elliott is fascinating. On the final day of Leopardstown’s Christmas meeting Elliott trained his 100th Grade One winner, and his 2,000th jumps winner in Ireland. For Elliott, the only context for his sky-scraping numbers is Mullins. It had taken the champion trainer 27 years to reach that landmark; Elliott achieved it in 17 years. It was like Mullins broke the four-minute mile and then Elliott dipped under 10 seconds for the 100 metres.
“It was Gordon that pushed us to get bigger,” says Patrick Mullins. “It wasn’t the other way. If you go back to the championships maybe 10 years ago it was Gordon that got bigger and got more horses and more winners. We had to push forward to keep up with him – we had to expand to try to keep ahead.
“It’s not a case that we’ve been dragging Gordon, he’s been pushing us. Without Gordon Elliott we wouldn’t be as big or as good as we are.”
Mullins mentioned the trainer’s championship from 10 years ago as a random marker. The story follows the numbers. In the 2014/15 season Elliott saddled 141 individual horses at the track; last season that number had grown to a staggering 340.
The title is decided by prize money and Mullins has more horses for Grade One races than anybody else, but in terms of day-to-day volume, Mullins couldn’t afford to fall off the scorching pace that Elliott had set. In that 10-season span, his number of individual horses at the track climbed from 177 to 291.
“The fascinating thing is how Gordon’s results have kept pace with the increasing scale of the operation,” says Ryan McElligott, who has helped Elliott with his race planning for the last 10 years. “That doesn’t always happen.”
In a cut-throat business, Elliott is an entrepreneur. He didn’t come from money or land. He wasn’t born into horses either; he was drawn to them. His father was a panel beater in the Co Meath town of Summerhill, but Elliott’s uncles were owners and when they went racing, he sat in for the ride. They had horses in Tony Martin’s yard and Elliott was barely a teenager when he started working there on weekends and on other days when his parents thought he was in school.
Elliott suffered formal education for as long as he could bear it but left before his Junior Cert. He committed to horses, wherever that would take him.
“He was a very average amateur [jockey],” says Eddie O’Leary, racing manager for Gigginstown Stud, the biggest owners in Elliott’s yard. “Most jockeys, all they see is the tips of the horse’s ears [from the saddle]. Gordon was aware of the fact that he wasn’t going to make it as a jockey, so he concentrated more on the horses, rather than just looking at their ears.”
Elliott built his business from scratch, working with cast-offs from other yards and turning the odd sow’s ear into a silk purse. His current yard is spectacular, but when he acquired the site 13 years ago it was 80 acres of blank canvass. The 200-year-old farmhouse was so cold in the winter that he used to wear a duffel coat indoors.
Elliott moved there in the summer of 2012, when racing was still sheepish after the economic crash and trainers all over the country were losing horses and money. His expansion swam against the tide.
“Could I have built something like this from nothing?” Mullins wrote at the end of his piece in the Racing Post. “I think probably not.”
“Gordon would be the first to admit it, I’d say he surprised himself, the way he’s done things,” says Davy Russell, who rode against Elliott as an amateur, and was the leading jockey in the yard for many years. “It just exploded.”
In the spring of 2021, though, everything he had built was in peril. A deplorable photograph of Elliott sitting astride a dead horse was circulated on social media. His reputation was thrashed, and his training license was suspended for six months. Cheveley Park Stud, one of the most resourceful owners in the yard, removed their horses, including Cheltenham Festival winners, and in the early weeks of the blaze, nobody was sure how much of his career the flames would consume.
“It knocked the stuffing out of him personally,” says O’Leary. “He was guilty of being stupid, that’s all he was guilty of. He wasn’t guilty of any welfare issue; he was guilty of stupidity. He lost some very, very good horses. That was the worst six months of his life. It was a diabolical kicking. To have built what he built and then for it all to be taken away from under him. For a fella to come from nowhere and to have built Cullentra [his yard] into what it is today, at his age [46 now], that was incredible.
“Did the suspension change him? It did, of course, massively. Massively. First of all, he was very, very contrite. It probably made him more personable. It made him say to himself, ‘I have to show the world how good I am and how clean I am’. He had to double down. He had to re-attract owners and reinvent himself as the Gordon we all know and trust.”
Gigginstown had always been his biggest supporters and after the suspension they expanded their footprint in the yard. Last season alone, Elliott trained 53 horses in their colours; this season that number has already reached 47.
Many other owners were intensely loyal to Elliott too. A company owned by Noel and Valerie Moran, eComm Merchant Solutions, terminated their sponsorship of the yard when the scandal struck, but the Moran’s horses remained in Cullentra and they returned as yard sponsors under the umbrella of Bective Stud. JP McManus nailed his colours to Elliott’s mast too.
“When some people saw owners going, they saw it as an opportunity for them to be higher up the pecking order,” says Russell. “A lot of owners were happy to drive on when they saw there might be a gap or that he might be down horses. They were willing to support him and we felt that from the ground as well.”
His numbers now are bigger than ever. Already this season he has saddled runners for 103 different owners. In each of the last two seasons he has sent out more than 1,250 runners, crossing that threshold for the first time in his career. Only once has Mullins sent out in excess of 900 runners in a season.
“He would campaign his horses aggressively,” says McElligott. “They would be kept busy. There is no question of horses being wrapped up. He picked up plenty from his time with Martin Pipe [as an amateur jockey] and Pipe won a huge volume of races.”
Pipe was champion trainer in Britain 15 times; Elliott has been runner-up to Mullins in Ireland for the last 10 years in a row, and a dozen times in all. Everybody else has given up the chase. For at least the last 15 years Elliott has spoken openly about his desire to be champion trainer. Mullins casts the longest shadow in Irish sport, and others would have withered in that half-light, but nothing has forced Elliott to relent.
“He was a tough man to ride against,” says Russell, “and he’s still the same. He’s a tough man.”
“He is driven by success only,” says O’Leary. “A pound here or there doesn’t bother him. It’s a good horse he wants. He’s not driven by money, he’s driven by success.”
Trainers stand or fall by what they see in a horse. If it was always obvious, it would make no difference. Tiger Roll won two Grand Nationals for Elliott, but early in his career Gigginstown had lost faith in him and he was listed for their end-of-season dispersal sale. Elliott convinced O’Leary to keep him.
“I can guarantee you, I wouldn’t have sent him over fences,” says Russell. “He was only 15.2 [hands tall] and not very good at jumping. What he did with Tiger Roll was phenomenal.”
In the same colours Don Cossack won the Cheltenham Gold Cup. What he needed first was patience and tenderness. “He was an absolute raving lunatic as a young horse,” says O’Leary. “He went wayward because he was all wrong mentally. It took a couple of years, but Gordon got into his head. Gordon can get into a horse’s head and change things. That was an amazing training performance.”
How did he do it? Genius floats above explanations.
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