After all these years, Mullins still undisputed king of the Cotswolds

Like fish and chips, salt and pepper and bread and butter, Willie Mullins and the Cheltenham Festival are inextricably linked.

This season marks the 30-year anniversary of the Closutton maestro’s Festival breakthrough via Tourist Attraction in the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle. Three decades on, he is the undisputed king of the Cotswolds.

Mullins has been leading trainer at National Hunt racing’s showpiece event on 11 occasions, including in each of the past six years. The nine winners he saddled in 2024 was only one short of the record he set in 2022 and he has not left Prestbury Park with less than six victories since 2019.

It was almost inevitable he would reach the scarcely believable figure of 100 Festival winners 12 months ago, powering past the century to end the week on 103 which puts him a full 30 winners ahead of another Cheltenham great in Nicky Henderson.

On the back of a Dublin Racing Festival which saw him strike seven times, and plunder six of the eight Grade One prizes up for grabs, the stage looks set for another Mullins masterclass in mid-March.

“We had a great Dublin Racing Festival and I’m delighted with how everything went in our preparation for Cheltenham 2025,” he said at what has become an annual pre-Festival media visit to his yard.

“I think the string couldn’t be in better order, we’re very happy with how it is. I think the prep since Christmas has been very good and most of the horses we want to get to Cheltenham are on course.”

On arrival this year, the press were handed a sheet featuring the names of 17 equine stars being prepared to take the Festival by storm – only part of a squad that Mullins expects will be “definitely north of 50” once it has been finalised.

The term ‘Willie Mullins Bingo’ has become common place at this time of year due to the fact the trainer gives most of his horses multiple engagements and rarely makes a final decision on their ultimate target until final declaration time, leaving punters playing a guessing game.

This time around, however, he feels he has his ducks in a row, saying: “Unlike other years, we have our plans fairly well made. I think there are very few horses that are 50-50 for different races – at least in my mind anyhow – so we’re probably way more forward this year than we have been in other years.”

In novice hurdles, Mullins will split his aces by running Kopek Des Bordes in the Supreme and Final Demand in the Turners, while the lack of a middle-distance option this year also makes the task of dividing his star novice chasers relatively straightforward, with Majborough a major player in the Arkle and Ballyburn poised for a rise in distance in the Brown Advisory.

As far as the championship races are concerned, State Man and Lossiemouth look set to form a pincer movement on Constitution Hill in the Champion Hurdle, Gaelic Warrior is not out of the equation in either the Queen Mother Champion Chase or the Ryanair and Fact To File could be favourite for the latter if connections head that way.

There is no doubt, though, which horse Mullins wants to win more than any other, with the great Galopin Des Champs bidding to join rarefied company by completing a Cheltenham Gold Cup hat-trick.

Indeed, for Mullins it would be his crowning moment – but while bookmakers make an historic third win an odds-on shot, the man himself is not even daring to dream.

“To us here, it’s unbelievable that we’ve got a horse that’s going for a third Gold Cup and could be in the Best Mate/Arkle category,” he said.

“To be associated with a horse like this, who is so well known now, is a huge honour. We’re all delighted to be involved and we just hope the dream stays alive.

“I’m not dreaming it will happen. If you think it’s going to happen, it probably won’t, so I’m going in the opposite direction.

“If this horse can do what Arkle and Best Mate did, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime job, isn’t it? I think there was 40 years between them, so we’re maybe 20 years too soon!”

Mullins’ apparent pessimism is fuelled by his experience that anything can go wrong at any minute.

“I think of my father (Paddy Mullins) when he was training Dawn Run for the Champion Hurdle. Gaye Brief was favourite for Mercy Rimell and we heard just before the meeting that he’d got injured and I remember we were in the yard clapping our hands, but my father heard it and said ‘There but for the grace of God go I’,” Mullins went on.

“And now I’m in his position and every morning I wake up and don’t get a bad report about any of the horses, let alone the Grade One horses we have here today, that’s a blessing.

“I’m not wishing bad luck on me and I’m not wishing bad luck on my competitors – I just hope we all get there.”

Mullins need not go back as far as the days of Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup heroine Dawn Run to point out how quickly Cheltenham dreams can be dashed, of course, with Nicky Henderson’s 2024 blowout – the veteran trainer’s first year in 16 without a Festival winner after an apparent bug swept through Seven Barrows – still fresh in the memory.

“What happened to Nicky last year, to me is what we all dread, that we have something going through the yard a week or two weeks before Cheltenham,” said Mullins.

“We were gutted for him, and it could have been us. Every year we’re the same, we’re all on the lookout for horses coughing, going down maybe with a colic, something unusual in the yard.

“Every time you get something unusual, then something else happens and it’s a coincidence, then you get three coincidences, and it doesn’t become a coincidence, you’re wondering ‘is something going through the yard?’.

“And that’s what happens. You get odd things happening with injuries to horses and if you get two or three of them in a row, then the horses are under a cloud, and you have to watch out and back off everything. It’s a huge worry all the time.”

Mullins might be past retirement age at 68, but worryingly for his rivals, he is showing absolutely no sign of taking his foot off the accelerator. In fact, he is arguably more dominant than ever, as evidenced by the fact he is currently champion trainer on both sides of the Irish Sea.

On defending his British title, he added: “I’m not thinking about it, maybe right in the back of my head somewhere.

“I want to get to Cheltenham and see how things work out and then like last year, we’ll be depending a lot on Aintree.

“Certainly, if Cheltenham works out, it will come forward, but we’d need a Cheltenham like we had last year and then we needed to win the Grand National and everything else went right.

“I looked at last year as a one-off that could never happen again, so it’s going to be very hard, but it would be huge to do it again.”