Numbers + Quality x Experience = Genius.

​Racehorse trainers get better at their job through experience. Sometimes, especially when youthful, trainers can get lucky and have a horse of immense ability in their yard and yet after that horse has retired to either the stallion barn or the breeding paddocks, life is never as sweet again.
It has to be remembered that Willie Mullins was no kid-wonder. He didn’t receive his trainers’ licence on a Monday and proceed to set the turf firmament alight by the end of the first week of his new career. Willie toiled at the wheel for many a year before his star began to seen as relevant and perhaps enduring. I bet any money Willie Mullins made a pocketful of mistakes in his early years. I bet he would confess to running horses in the wrong races, at the wrong tracks, ridden by the wrong jockeys and said wrong words to owners. If Willie Mullins is a god of this sport, he has to be a very human sort of god, a delegator god, a god with a well-trained and experienced eye. Mind you, gods, true gods, gods deserving of a capital G, must work out their far-reaching plans on instinct alone. No committee meetings or blueprints. And from what I read about the man, the genius, suggests to me that he asks, he listens, deliberates, observes, leaves the definite till the last moment, changes his mind and then delivers the correct decision. I suspect his decisions surprise even the closest of his staff. It wouldn’t surprise me if sometimes he surprises himself. 
Fate can work in someone’s favour, also. If Michael O’Leary had not taken away the sixty-plus horses Mullins trained for him over a dispute about training fees, would Closutton be the invincible force today that it has become? Mullins was one of the leading trainers in Britain and Ireland at the time but he wasn’t the dominant force he is now. Mullins turned a career set-back into an opportunity to seek out new owners and to take his business to the mind-blowing level he is presently achieving.
I believe we should think of Willie Mullins in terms of a coach, not a team bus, but someone in the mould of Linford Christie, a trainer of athletes. Top athletes, I believe, attempt to take their achievements to new levels by transferring their training programmes to athletic coaches who already train elite athletes. Linford Christie specialises in sprinters. Aston Moore long and triple jumpers. Athletes improve when they train alongside athletes better than themselves.
Horses very rarely improve when sold out of Willie Mullins care, not because he has got the best out of them already, though that might be the case, but because on the gallops and schooling grounds of Closutton there are not one or two or five or six brilliant chasers and hurdlers but tens of dozens of superior equine athletes, all of them ridden at exercise by some of the top riders in Ireland. I doubt if there is any hiding place on the gallops for the horse of less than Grade 1 ability. And on the ground, there is Willie Mullins guiding, advising, marking in his mind’s eye for later reference details lesser humans would miss.
Also, and this point should not be glossed over, Willie Mullins games the play in Ireland with the spirit of a general in the field of battle. And if he misses a detail now and then, it is doubtless picked up by his son or David Casey or Ruby Walsh. 
If the Irish race-programme was similar to the programme British trainers must work with, his numbers would likely be less impressive. He has Grade 2 horses in abundance, horses that would be handicapped out of winning if they were trained over here yet the Irish calendar has conditions races in abundance throughout the year. Horses that would have to shoulder 12-stone and more in handicaps, jump around the lesser tracks with less weight, sometimes on even terms with opponents, some times giving away 7 or 10Ibs to horses that if it were a handicap would be receiving 2-stone.
If those same conditions chases and hurdles were transferred to these shores, especially through the summer, believe me, Nicky Henderson, Paul Nicholls and Dan Skelton would lap them up. In fact, why don’t British trainers consider giving Willie a run for his money by taking him on with their own badly-handicapped chasers and hurdlers? The place money alone would pay for the journey across the water even if they couldn’t lower the Mullins colours on every occasion.
If the British race-programme was not so afflicted by the over-arching wish for larger field sizes and greater competitiveness, perhaps the top owners presently flocking to Mullins and his Irish rivals might decide to stay here if there were races for the type of horse that Willie keeps especially for those not-so-hard-to-win conditions chases and hurdles.
The way to stop one-trainer dominance is not to limit the number of horses any one trainer can run in any one race but to limit the number of horses any one trainer can have in his or her stable. Of course, if Willie was limited to 100-horses, for example, or 150, he would set-up a satellite yard and put his son Patrick in charge. Yet a limit on numbers would force owners to look elsewhere and top staff would by necessity be dispersed to trainers who presently desperately need top-quality staff and prize-money would be spread around to a better extent than now. Willie would still dominate but hopefully not to the detriment of either those following in his wake or the sport as a whole.
Willie Mullins has the horse numbers, the horse quality, staff of equine Mensa ability and skill and expertise accrued through the experience of success and failure to rank him a genius of his profession. But that does not necessarily equate to him being better at his job than any other trainer in Ireland or Britain. And the wheel will turn. As it has always turned down the centuries of this sport.