Those suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder look away now. Winter started on Wednesday. Horse Racing Ireland (HRI) said so, officially launching the winter jumps season by getting Willie Mullins to face assorted media.
Just 72 hours after the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, and on a sparkling autumn day, it was a jolting change of gear from a long summer narrative of Aidan O’Brien dominance to focus instead on his National Hunt equivalent.
Just to add to the seasonal flux, some of the best-known stalwarts of the winter game were behaving like flighty spring lambs. Old enough to know better, and with a long campaign not even having begun, Gaelic Warrior was among those scattering onlookers.
The difference between the codes is that any racing fan worth their salt knows Gaelic Warrior can be a headbanger. Long before any such familiarity is established on the flat, the star name is usually whisked off to stud.
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But sure enough, a long line of old buddies led by the dual-Gold Cup hero Galopin Des Champs are back for another season, one where stamina, agility and almost manic courage are the order of the day rather than raw speed.
Also back again is their trainer. He was 69 last month, seemingly ageless, and more dominant than ever.
The man who’s redefined the parameters of jump racing success is already all but assured of a 20th Irish trainers’ title. There are cramped odds about being crowned Britain’s champion too for a third year in a row. It is unprecedented stuff with no end in sight to Mullins’s remorseless ambition.
It’s only six months since he accomplished what he described as the ultimate. His son Patrick won the Aintree Grand National on Nick Rockett, prompting depths of unashamed emotion that poured beyond the normally urbane exterior. The answer to where one goes after the ultimate, apparently, is to get back to doing the same thing, but even more so, no matter what the code.
When the first Grade One of the new jumps season takes place in Down Royal at the start of November, Mullins’s focus will be 6,000 miles away when his Ebor winner Ethical Diamond lines up for the Breeders’ Cup Turf in Del Mar. A horse that won a maiden hurdle at Punchestown in February, and scored at Royal Ascot in June, is taking a shot at a $5 million Californian bonanza.
“We’re going there as a competitor rather than thinking we’re going to get into the first three,” says the man who has turned Cheltenham into his backyard but has always looked beyond jump racing’s more narrow confines.
Ethical Diamond will go to the US rather than the Melbourne Cup due to ultra-strict Australian veterinary protocols that would frown on a screw put in a leg to fix a small fracture. Instead, another dual-purpose star, Absurde, has returned down under and will line up first in Saturday week’s Caulfied Cup.
“I think the mile-and-a-half of the Caulfied Cup will suit him a lot better than the Melbourne Cup, but he’ll run in both,” said Mullins, who is already checking out sending both horses to Meydan and even the Saudi Cup meeting in Riyadh in the early months of 2026 rather than go back to flights.
It won’t be long, though, before jumping will be the focus of all attention and Mullins’s every word and phrase will be parsed for significance.
Familiar themes such as his preference for keeping as many of his top names apart until absolutely necessary or keeping horses to races he feels they’re more likely to win rather than pitching competitively high, will be revisited. Many seem oblivious to the impossibility of arguing with his methodology. “I’m a creature of habit,” he admitted again.
If Nick Rockett was the individual race result that meant most of all last season, it’s not hard to detect some unfinished business in terms of the Cheltenham championship events. He equalled his own record of 10 winners in a week and was crowned leading trainer for a 12th time. But none of them came in the four festival feature events.
Galopin Des Champs came up short in his attempt to complete a Gold Cup hat-trick. That he looked transformed when, afterwards, winning spectacularly at Punchestown underlined a sense of frustration then, and a sense now of a score to settle come next March. It’s there too with State Man after his final-flight fall in the Champion Hurdle.
It won’t be long, either, before such names and the plans, news and speculation around them will be racing’s currency of the day.
Similarly, shop-talk will include the new Academy Hurdle races, the first of which takes place in Cork this Sunday. They are three-year-old jump races that won’t prevent winners from lining up in maiden hurdles. The idea is to get young horses out earlier. Mullins isn’t a fan of the HRI initiative, drawing comparisons with point-to-points.
Describing the races as a “sales ploy, nothing else”, he’s amazed at the concept of a horse winning a race but then not being regarded as a winner. “For years we’ve been trying to protect our racing, our betting, by having rules for inside the rails and they’ve gone totally against it which I find extraordinary,” he said.
As for the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board’s current public consultation survey designed to define minimum care standards for racehorses, Mullins’ response might be best described as withering. “They’re going to come down and tell us how to train?” he wondered.
It was all enough to get one looking forward to a long and eventful winter.
