Willie Mullins is a serial winner who knows how to lose
This lark about how practice makes perfect? I don’t buy it.
If there’s one thing everyone in the history of sports knows how to do all too well then it’s losing. Unless you’re an All Black, a Dublin footballer or the kid who owns the ball and decides on the rules, then the odds are you know more about dejection and slumped shoulders than the pumped fist of victory. Even Michael Jordan lost more than he won. He said so himself.
Going by that sort of logic, we should all be ‘good’ losers, but how many of us are?
One complicating factor is the reality that one person’s definition of a good loser is another’s idea of a bad one. For every Vince Lombardi who says “show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser” there is a Casey Stengel who reasoned that everyone has to lose some time so, when you do, “lose ‘em right”. Willie Mullins loses ‘em right.
It might seem odd to associate Mullins so closely with defeat given nobody does success in Irish sport like the Closutton-based jumps trainer. The BBC asked him once how he celebrated victories. He said: “We had plenty of practice — just in the usual Irish manner really!” This was April 2005 and within a few days Hedgehunter went and won him his first Grand National at Aintree.
You’d be forgiven for seeing this as his everyday life.
Champion Irish trainer for the past decade, Mullins’ legend has been built, in the main, on a spectacular strike rate at the Cheltenham festival. The six winners he claimed last week brought to 54 the number he has delivered at the Prestbury Park gala. It stretches back to his first with Tourist Attraction in the Weatherbys Champion Bumper 22 years ago. Since then he has served up for public consumption delectable treats such as Quevega, Hurricane Fly, Vautour, Faugheen, and Douvan. His partnership with Ruby Walsh has minted the pockets of thousands of punters devoted to the theory a few quid on that partnership can rarely see you too far wrong in a game where the dice is loaded in the bookies’ favour.
And yet nothing says more about Mullins the man as much as his manner in defeat.
Gordon Elliott currently stands roughly €400,000 ahead of him in the race to be champion trainer at the end of the season. Chances are it will be the first time since 2007 Mullins doesn’t top that list. A far from insignificant reason for that is the decision by Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary to remove his 60-strong Gigginstown stable from Closutton to Elliott’s Cullentra yard last September in a dispute over fees.
Mullins’ response has been exemplary. When Elliott saddled an astonishing six winners in Navan last November, Mullins was one of the first over with his congratulations and he was top of the queue again last week with a handshake and a joke for O’Leary when Apple’s Jade, a former resident of his now housed with Elliott, saw off his own Vroum Vroum Mag and Limini in the Mares Hurdle race at Cheltenham.
“Willie Mullins is a genius of a man and a gentleman too,” said Elliott four months ago. Mullins would have to wait until the Thursday last week, the 2017 festival’s third day, before getting his name on the board but more disappointment awaited come the Friday when his ongoing search for a first Gold Cup win came up short again with Djakadam fading up the hill having led the field under Ruby Walsh for an all-too-brief spell.
“Disappointed he only finished fourth, but that’s as good as he is,” Mullins said afterwards. “He was a little unlucky with the jump at the second last, but he jumped perfect up to that. He might have made a better placing but we can’t really complain. It didn’t cost him the race. We’ve had a fantastic festival. I’m feeling a lot better now than I was on Wednesday evening. So I can’t complain.”
Can’t complain: that was no new chord he sounded.
Mullins has finished second in the Gold Cup six times. Different years, different horses, jockeys and winners but the response has remained the same: praise the winner, accept the result and move on. “No excuses,” he has said time and again. More often than not, he has expressed his delight with the race run by his runner-up.
This equanimity and graciousness was never more pronounced than three years ago when Lord Windermere and Davy Russell edged out On His Own and David Casey by a short head, in the Gold Cup but only after a 15-minute enquiry undertaken on the back of what some suggested was interference by the Jim Culloty-trained winner.
The result stood and, although there were whispers of a possible appeal on the part of Mullins and owner Graham Wylie, they were ultimately drowned out. “I had a good chat with Mr and Mrs Wylie and we just felt that, as we didn’t win it on the day, there was no point in trying to win it on a different day,” Mullins explained later that week. “It just wouldn’t be the same.”
Win right, lose right. We could all learn a little from that.
