the racing world currently belongs to Willie mullins.

​Despite all that I have said about this year’s Grand National, on the whole I have no real issue with any one trainer having six or more runners in the race. I would prefer it not to be the case but I would rather that the maximum number of runners not being reached. Obviously, I would give oceans for there to be more British-trained horses in the race, plus a few from trainers unused to the big occasions, as was once the situation.
As what has been done to the Grand National continues upset me, I shall move on.
We live in Willie’s world. He is now central to everything that matters in the sport and collectively we should praise his achievements and keep away from criticising his domination. As Gordon Elliott said during Cheltenham, British trainers only have to face-up to Willie for a few days a year, he has to take him on seven-days-a-week.
Although the number of horses he trains is far larger than his counterparts in past decades, his domination of the major races is similar to when Vincent O’Brien came, saw and conquered. People tend to forget that for a couple of decades the man to fear was Tom Dreaper; Arkle was not the only great horse he trained and his raids on Cheltenham were looked upon with the same fear and envy as Willie Mullins today. Michael Dickinson, too, ruled the roost for many seasons and to a less extent, given the phenomenal numbers of winners he trained during his career, Martin Pipe.
The world turns and we turn with it. Willie rules and we are but his subjects. One should be remember, when the O’Leary brothers fell-out with Mullins over training fees, it seemed to all of us that the bottom had fallen out of Willie’s career. I believe he lost up to sixty-horses in one fell swoop and yet his present position of king of all he surveys began the day those horses left Closutton. He rose from adversity to become a colossus. He deserves his reign as the man everyone of his rivals fear the most. O’Brien, Dreaper, Dickinson, Pipe, Mullins.
Vincent O’Brien transferred his genius to flat racing, Tom Dreaper’s owners died away, Michael Dickinson was seduced by Robert Sangster to the flat, perhaps a decision that haunts him to this day and Martin Pipe retired and his major owners, too, leaving this world before son David could be similarly advantaged by their buying power.
Closutton, too, will lose the owners that underpin Willie’s success, he, too, will weary and hand over the baton to his son and as when Tom Dreaper acceded to his son Jim, the major races will continue to be won by a Dreaper, only for the same scenario of major owners dying and new powerful owners planting their seeds in the stables of Closutton’s rivals.
Willie Mullins deserves his success. He comes across as a nice man, always willing to talk to the media and to be as helpful as his mercurial nature will allow. The thing with people associated with ‘genius’ is that they cannot explain to themselves let alone explain to others how it all works, what he does that gives him the edge. It happens. Doubtless it is an accumulation of experiences over a lifetime of being around horses, the mistakes made good, what went wrong over the years turned into nuggets of gold, his mind becoming ever more attuned to the thoughts, moods and emotions of the horses in his charge. There is only so much he can teach Patrick, the golden stuff he will have to pick up himself. I suspect Willie listens to the people he employs and sees what his horses are telling him. Horses can talk, yet only a few rare people can understand what is being conveyed.
And you have to remember, Willie Mullins trains as many losers as anyone else, it is just, I believe, that with Willie he learns more from those that do not win as he does from those that do win.
And another point worth bearing in mind, as when an athletics coach has many world-record holders under his supervision, Willie has so many Grade 1 horses that on the gallops the lesser horses have to work harder and gain a higher level of fitness than if those same horses were trained by someone with no Grade 1 horses, and of course some horses of Grade 1 ability are not always good work-horses themselves, yet they also benefit from having so many top-class horses around them.
Willie Mullins has peaked. He cannot get any better, even if he adds the British trainers’ crown to his many Irish titles, and at some point, given he runs multiple horses in Grade 1’s, some owners will get fed-up with being also-rans and transfer those horses to other trainers in hope of a transformation in their win ratio. But as of this age of the sport, Willie Mullins is the greatest we have ever seen, even if we must bear in mind that he trains far more horses year-in, year-out, than any of the ‘genius’ trainers that have come before him and that he exists at a period of the sport where there are fewer trainers, fewer big-spending owners and far fewer horses in training. For all that, though, we must fall-down at his feet and praise him for his supremacy. There is only one Willie Mullins. Let us hope that in ten or twenty-years time we are not saying there is only one Patrick Mullins!