Willie Mullins at 70 - relentless focus is powered by patience
Trainer Willie Mullins watching on as Fact To File is saddled in Punchestown last year. Pic: Healy Racing
Defining a sporting great is a tricky business, especially in an era where the word is so routinely attributed to people on the back of a handful of positive results.
But one key measurement is surely longevity. Think Lionel Messi and Ronaldo in soccer, TJ Reid in hurling, Ronnie O’Sullivan in snooker, and Katie Taylor who brought down the curtain on her remarkable boxing career at Croke Park earlier this month. And think Willie Mullins in racing.
The 20-time champion trainer of Ireland turns 70 on Tuesday and remains as relentlessly driven as ever. And given his father, the legendary Paddy Mullins, trained until he was 86, breeding suggests his son will be around for some considerable time to come, a daunting prospect for his rivals.
Given his background it’s always tempting to assume there was an inevitability about William Peter Mullins making it to the top. There wasn’t. Indeed getting his trainer's license from the Turf Club required a white lie to the inspector on his part as Mullins fell short of the minimum requirement of six horses needed to be approved. Much water has flowed under the bridge since that act of subterfuge in 1988.
Over 4,500 winners have been trained under his name since Silver Bachelor got the ball rolling at Thurles a few weeks later.
Over 100 of them, 121 to be precise, have come at the Cheltenham Festival, a meeting Mullins now routinely dominates.
This year’s tally of eight winners was two less than the record 10 he achieved in 2022 and emulated in 2025 but it included the three main races of the week: The Champion Hurdle, the Champion Chase, and the Cheltenham Gold Cup, a hat-trick only previously achieved by Henry de Bromhead in 2021.
Not content with that, Mullins won his third successive Grand National as I Am Maximus regained the crown he had lost to stablemate Nick Rockett last year.
Mullins was no overnight success. Tourist Attraction’s shock Supreme Novices’ Hurdle victory at the 1995 Cheltenham Festival didn’t open the floodgates.
Nor did the Champion Bumper success of Wither Or Which who Mullins himself rode to victory a year later.
In fact 1998 was the only Cheltenham where Mullins trained more than a single winner until the 2008 Festival where he again saddled two.
It seems unthinkable now but he drew a blank at Cheltenham on three occasions in that 10-year period: 1999, 2003, and 2006.
Linking up with flamboyant banker Rich Ricci moved the dial, the pair claiming their first Cheltenham success as a partnership when Mikael D’Haguenet won the Ballymore Novices’ Hurdle in 2009, the first Festival where Mullins trained more than two winners across the week.
At that point, Mullins had not yet won a championship race at Cheltenham but he put that right in 2011 when Hurricane Fly swatted his rivals aside to win the Champion Hurdle.
Two years later, the George Creighton-owned Hurricane Fly became only the second horse in history after Comedy Of Errors to regain the Champion Hurdle, a feat, along with his remarkable unbeaten record at Leopardstown where he won 10 of his 22 Grade Ones, that explains why Mullins instantly opted for him when asked by his longtime stable jockey Ruby Walsh if he has a favourite horse in a fascinating interview earlier this year.
“Hurricane Fly. At the time, he was just dynamite, wasn’t he? When I think of the money that he cost at that time, it was huge. I don’t think we’d ever spent anything like that sort of money on a horse.”
Quevega was another expensive French recruit from this period to prove money well spent, winning the Mares’ Hurdle six times between 2009 and 2014 to surpass Golden Miller, a five-time Gold Cup winner in the 1930s, as the winningmost horse in Cheltenham Festival history.
It would be tempting to assume that record will never be equalled let alone surpassed but given the Mullins-trained Lossiemouth is already up to four and will still only be an eight-year-old come the 2027 Cheltenham Festival that can’t be said with confidence.
The 2015 Festival was the first where Mullins truly began to dominate as he trained eight winners, three owned by Ricci: Douvan, Faugheen, and Vautour. Ironically that meeting is best remembered for the fall of Annie Power that saved bookies millions.
A year later, Annie Power got her deserved day in the sun, storming to victory in the Champion Hurdle at a Festival where five of Mullins’ seven winners were owned by Ricci.
However, later that year came a heavy blow as Michael O’Leary’s Gigginstown House Stud removed 60 horses from Mullins’ care after a row over training fees. Not only did the decision weaken Mullins overnight, the fact the vast majority went to Gordon Elliott strengthened his main rival.
As a consequence, Mullins went into the final week of the season at Punchestown trailing Elliott by over €400,000 in the title race, a seemingly impossible gap to bridge. Not only did Mullins do so, he did so in style, winning €937,075 over the week at Punchestown to beat his rival by €199,455.
Though Elliott again took the title race to the final week last season, Mullins’ championship dominance has never been seriously threatened.
But one prize continued to elude Mullins: The Cheltenham Gold Cup.
Florida Pearl was the first Mullins-trained horse to hit the crossbar when second in 2000. He would not be the last. By the time the 2019 Cheltenham Festival dawned, Mullins had found one too good on six occasions.
He finally cracked it with Al Boum Photo that year and the floodgates opened. Al Boum Photo repeated the feat a year later and was emulated as a dual Closutton Gold Cup winner by Galopin Des Champs, the best staying chaser Mullins has ever trained, when he won the blue riband in 2023 and 2024.
Earlier this year the victory of Gaelic Warrior saw Mullins go level with Arkle handler Tom Dreaper as the most successful trainer in Gold Cup history. Some turnaround for a man who had resigned himself to never winning the race.
If emulating his father by winning the Gold Cup was an aspiration that became an obsession, becoming the champion trainer of Britain wasn’t on his radar.
But nine wins at the 2024 Festival, including the Champion Hurdle with State Man and the Gold Cup with Galopin Des Champs, made it a live possibility and the Grand National success of I Am Maximus made it a probability. A few weeks later, Mullins became the first Irishman since Vincent O’Brien to win the British jump trainers’ title.
“It's something different,” Mullins told ITV. “You hope to win the Irish championship. You never dream of winning the British one. To do something the legend of the game Vincent O'Brien did 70 years ago was not something I ever had in my mind to do because I didn't think it could be done.”
He repeated the feat a year later, largely as a result of saddling the first three horses home in the National. That was his greatest day, one unlikely to ever be topped given the winner, Nick Rockett, was ridden by his son Patrick, the man who will one day replace him as trainer.
“This is the summit for me, I don’t think it can get any better than this. It’s just huge. It’s like something out of a Disney film,” he said.
However, his relentless focus on winning has never blinded Mullins to the bigger picture.
The temptation to send Un De Sceaux to Cheltenham as an outrageously talented but headstrong six-year-old in 2014 was resisted, a decision that was vindicated by victory in the Arkle Novices’ Chase a year later and a Ryanair Chase success at the 2017 Cheltenham Festival.
That was something he learned from his father, Willie said in that interview with Walsh when asked how much he took from him.
“A huge amount. And the biggest thing I got from him, which I didn’t realise and I didn’t know what it was at the time, was patience. And I find the older I get, the more patient I’m getting.”
Another Mullins strength is that he never takes success for granted, a stance he again reiterated at his pre-Cheltenham media day before this year’s Festival.
“I’m always fascinated when people say to me ‘how many this year, Willie? Six, seven, eight or 10?’ People expect us to have winners. We go there hoping for one and if we get the first one on the first day then hopefully we might get two or three but we don’t go over expecting winners.”
He mightn’t but everyone else does. And given 73 of Mullins’ 121 Cheltenham winners and three of his four Grand National winners came in his 60s, it’ll be fascinating to see what he goes on to achieve in his 70s.
