Renowned for his brilliant judge of pace Danny Mullins trusts the process not the results
THREE-MENDOUS: Danny Mullins shows his delight after completing a Grade One treble on the opening day of the Dublin Racing Festival by winning the Irish Arkle on Il Etait Temps. Pic: ©INPHO/Morgan Treacy
- John Ryan, Racing Post, August 28, 2021
HE sits down with a broad grin and proffered hand. He is wearing a suit jacket and slacks, with open-necked shirt and unusually hirsute locks given his profession.
As keen followers of racing will know, Danny Mullins is not one for following the herd. Right now, he’s making me feel like I should have made more of an effort.
“I learned that lesson early in life,” he says with a chortle. “It’s easier to pull off being over-dressed than under-dressed.”
Who told you that?
“Ruby.” The man with the jumper?
“I’d say he’s badly dressed more so (than under-dressed)… bad fashion maybe.”
That’s Danny Mullins for you. Sharp, slightly irreverent, but in a way only those with a humour bypass could take to heart.
Ruby Walsh’s name crops up in a lot of his interviews. Readers of this publication have been lucky to be exposed to the Kill legend’s expert analysis long before he changed racing punditry on television upon his retirement from the saddle. As a member of his Uncle Willie’s Closutton team for many years, Mullins was fortunate to have direct access to the multiple champion jockey. When Ruby spoke, he listened and mined the gold.
You see, he might not look like a grizzled jump racing pilot and he certainly does enjoy leaving that floppy hair down when not working (albeit in a teetotal fashion) but his deadly, DEADLY serious about his profession.
He learned graft from his mother Mags and father Tony, both Cheltenham Festival winning trainers despite having small yards. The decency that trainer John Ryan spoke about, must come from the same source too.
These are the twin traits that have enabled Mullins to rebuild his career a few times, be it after losing his job as Barry Connell’s retained rider at just 22 or recovering from a broken neck.
Now 34, he is among the busiest riders in the weigh room. As a freelancer, he never said no to a gig and was even very successful on regular overnight trips to America for a while. He travels the miles to ride work and treats people fairly. Being relatively tall for a jockey, he has long been a regular in the gym. The reward is lots of rides for lots of trainers.
Willie has first call on his talents when Paul Townend is not available or he has more than one runner in a race. Being on a second or third-string Closutton charge is no hindrance to winning as evidenced by Mullins landing the first three Grade 1s at Dublin Racing Festival last month on Dancing City, Kargese and Il Etait Temps.
“It just goes to show when you’re on the Mullins team, anything can happen,” says Danny. “I could have easily gone through the weekend, as I went through Christmas, with loads of seconds, thirds and loads of prize money, everyone happy but Danny not winning. So when the ball bounces, it’s fantastic.”
The state of flow high-achieving sportspeople encounter when they feel unbeatable, when no decision is second-guessed and everything is going right is an unknown for us mere mortals.
But Mullins explains that he wouldn’t have ridden the Goffs Irish Arkle Novice Chase any differently had he not prevailed in the Nathaniel Lacy & Partners Solicitors Novice Hurdle and the McCann Fitzgerald Spring Juvenile Hurdle, and lays out his philosophy, as heavily influenced by the aforementioned Walsh.
“In sport, I think confidence is always very good but for me… It’s probably Ruby would have taught me early days, to analyse something has happened rather than happened. You can remove your results from it. I could go out tomorrow and give a horse a very bad ride to win, get a load of pats on the back but be very angry with myself going home, thinking, ‘Why did I do that?’ Just because I won doesn’t mean I gave it a good ride.
“On the flip side, sometimes just because I got beat doesn’t mean it’s a bad ride. I’ve probably given some of the best rides I’ve ever given horses (only) to get beat. Once I’m happy I’ve gotten what I wanted out of a race, that carries forward.
“So you try to minimise how much the results are going to affect your performance going forward. You just want to ride each race to get the best out of each horse, no matter what the result was.”
As the sports managers like to say now, it’s about the process.
“If you’re doing the right things, the results are invariably going to come. There’s an interview somewhere with Alex Ferguson, maybe after he retired, and they asked him who he thought would do very well as an underdog in the League.
“He mentioned Aston Villa. And the reporter said, ‘But they got beat 4-1 last weekend.’ He said, ‘But they played great football. The result was unlucky.’ And they finished third or fourth where they should have finished maybe tenth. He’d seen it.
“Looking at the process rather than the result is probably the better logic rather than letting the results dictate what you’re going to do next.”
If you keep doing the right things, the results will look after themselves? “That’s it. Any fool can see what but it takes a good one to see why.”
He is renowned among his peers as the most professional in terms of prepping for races, doing homework based on the opposition horses, riders and betting and often charting different routes to his colleagues during a race. He is renowned as a brilliant judge of pace, illustrated by three of his biggest triumphs, when winning the King George VI Chase from behind on Tornado Flyer and then going pillar-to-post twice on Flooring Porter.
Flooring Porter’s inaugural Cheltenham Stayers’ Hurdle success in 2021 was his first festival victory. He had been second all too often. In 2015, Milsean was a half-length shy of Martello Tower in the Albert Bartlett, the winner owned by former boss Connell but trained by his mother.
That was probably a little easier to take than when Katie Walsh swooped late on Relegate to nab him by a neck in the Champion Bumper six years ago. He swears that it never ate at him though.
“I wanted to get the winner but I had that naïve certainty in myself that it was going to happen. A young lad coming in now in my position, you’d say it’s far from guaranteed it’s going to happen. And while I didn’t like finishing second, any sportsman should be able to accept defeat but not enjoy it.
“Even though my grandfather’s team wouldn’t be the size we have now (at Willie’s), but he was multiple champion trainer, my father a champion jockey (riding for him) and he didn’t get to ride a Cheltenham winner. It was only three days back then. He got his Cheltenham winner as a trainer.
“So it was maybe I was just that bit naïve. It thought it was going to happen.”
And when it did?
“That feeling crossing the line on my first Cheltenham winner during the Lockdown. That ten, twenty seconds after crossing the line is as good a feeling as I can remember.”
Even with no people?
“A lot of people have asked me that, with nobody there, did it take away from it. Even if there are thirty or forty thousand people there, when you’re on the horse, you’re in the zone. But that feeling when I crossed the line, was something that no crowd could take away at all.
“Coming back down the walkway, there were probably less than a hundred people there along the way and I’d say I knew the hundred of them. I knew the faces congratulating me the whole way down. We’re lucky to have so many great friends coming there year-in, year-out and you mightn’t get to see the people you know among the crowd.
“But that year, everyone that was congratulating me I knew fairly well from being on the circuit. It was different. Not something I want to experience again but I took a great buzz out of it.”
The day before, Heaven Help Us provided permit holder and Derby-winning greyhound trainer Paul Hennessy with a shock victory in the Coral Cup. Mullins had done much of the work with the mare and ridden her in most of her races but was retained to partner Dysart Diamond, who finished 30 lengths back in 20th.
“It’s funny... I had ridden Paul Hennessy’s mare all through her career but I couldn’t get on her. I was just hacking up to the finish, well out of the money. Seeing Paul running up alone, while I was riding, I turned the head and shouted, ‘Go on Paul ya good thing.’ He immediately turned to the crowd to see who said it but sure there was nobody there! He didn’t know where it had come from.
“I hadn’t got my Cheltenham winner at that stage but I was just proud of him for doing it and maybe some of the early mornings with that mare, the hours that we had put in, that he got the reward. The look of shock on his face was something else. He’d be a religious man. Maybe he thought it was coming from above!”
A huge rallying enthusiast, and part-time driver, Mullins hasn’t indulged in his passion in the last 12 months or so but his friend, Max Hart, a winner of the TCR China (touring car) finale in Macau last December, has promised to set him up in a race against professional go-karters later this year.
“Turning up to drive the normal go-karts is going to riding schools to get on the piebald (pony),” he explains by way of context. “Max said, ‘I’ll try organise to get you into one of the proper karts.’ It mightn’t be the high-level stuff. But it might be like riding in Thurles (rather than Cheltenham).
“I’m lucky, I’ve been racing so long that I’m very comfortable going out and competing with the lads at the highest level but to go into something like that again, different from a rally car, completely foreign and totally out of my comfort zone and to be honest, a little bit terrifying… going in with lads that are really able to do it, is a great feeling.”
The elite are always looking to make themselves uncomfortable.
