Cheltenham: Mullins empire strikes back with stunning four-timer

The Willie Mullins-Ruby Walsh empire struck back with a vengeance on day three of Cheltenham, securing a 179-1 four-timer that had cliches being kicked around harder than the home team on a day of remorseless Irish success.

And if most of the cliches were simply variations on ‘Crisis – What Crisis?’ they at least couldn’t be dismissed as irrelevant.

Of all the outrageous pre-festival predictions, any idea of racing’s dominant personalities might emerge from the first two days without a single winner would have been dismissed as ridiculous.

But with the mighty Douvan reduced to helplessness, and Mullins’s great rival Gordon Elliott banging in five winners, the unthinkable thought that the empire might be a busted festival flush wasn’t so much being muttered as proclaimed to the skies.

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Supposed 10-1 odds on Thursday morning about Walsh retaining the leading rider title competed for punter attention with doom-laden whispers that Mullins’s horses were ailing. Paddy Power paid out on Elliott as leading trainer. The racing world, as everyone knew it, seemed over.

And then the exquisitely prepared Yorkhill landed 6-4 odds in the JLT under an inspired Walsh steer to leave everything right again.

Un De Sceaux’s ebullient Ryanair Chase rout exuded rampant wellbeing and if Mullins felt he had so little chance of a first Stayers’ Hurdle success that he sipped tea while watching the race on telly, Nichols Canyon’s new-found zest for life helped carry him to a 10-1 victory.

By the time the 11-8 favourite Let’s Dance scored to make Walsh the first ever jockey to ride four winners in a single day here, those in the stands might even have been forgiven for singing ‘Easy-Easy’ as Mullins equalled his famous opening day four-timer in 2015.

Public mood-swings can rarely have been seen to be as fickle as this but if the outcome was widespread relief at normal service resumed, such relief didn’t seem to be shared by the two men at the eye of the rejuvenated empire.

Mullins or Walsh were never going to panic about a couple of days, even if they constituted half of the most important four days of the racing year. But they would have been less than human not to have been aware of the speculation.

“Willie’s attitude is that yesterday is history. You can’t look back and we knew we had chances today,” maintained Walsh, whose instinctive cool analysis of this most emotive of sports has always stood out. His boss admitted to not having felt “super confident” the night before. But there had been no panic.

“With the exception of Douvan, who had a veterinary problem, having been through the beaten horses there wasn’t any other race that we could or should have won. We were beaten by better horses. There can’t be anything wrong with them,” Mullins said.

“Today I would have taken one winner. People expect us to have winners here – we hope to have winners here. If it was easy there would be no pressure and no fun in it. The last two days show it’s a tough place to win and we respect the place. We have no God-given right to win,” he added.

By any standards, though, this will rank as one of the sweetest days of Mullins’s luminous career. He is much too smooth a character to gloat but considering what had happened for the first two days, this was momentum change on an epic scale.

Certainly for someone with a keen eye for racing history, he will have appreciated breaking his Stayers’ Hurdle duck while Mullins would be less than human not to appreciate the context of taking Michael O’Leary’s Ryanair sponsorship money just six months after their high-profile split.

Un De Sceaux’s heart-in-mouth style was an appropriate way for his trainer to reach the half-century mark of festival winners and he wasted little time in his pursuit of the all-time leading scorer Nicky Henderson with Let’s Dance’s win in the Mares’ Novice Hurdle taking him to 52.

If this four-timer leaves some expecting Djakadam to now win the Gold Cup on Friday, Mullins will again confine himself to hope. But no one will hope more fiercely for what is the ultimate prize that he has famously still to win.