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Vincent Finegan

Vincent Finegan

DFR success dependent on Mullins and Elliott

Gordon Elliott and Willie MullinsGordon Elliott and Willie Mullins
© Photo Healy Racing

Last week the preliminary entries were made for the eight Grade One races taking place at next month’s Dublin Racing Festival and not surprisingly they show how skewed the top end of the National Hunt game has become.

In total there were 118 entries for the Grade One contests and Willie Mullins, as you would predict, tops the poll with 47 of them. Gordon Elliott was responsible for a further 32 which means these two trainers account for some 66% of all the horses entered in the big races.

What is a little more surprising is that the other two leading jumps trainers, Henry De Bromhead and Gavin Cromwell, were only responsible for 6 and 3 entries respectively.

Based on this evidence it is difficult to see how Horse Racing Ireland (HRI) could justify bundling De Bromhead and Cromwell into the same category as Mullins and Elliott when deciding to preclude them from running horses in the new series of races that they announced for this year.

What also seems unfair about the blunt instrument HRI used to determine which trainers would not be allowed to run horses in certain races is that it only took into account the National Hunt performance of the trainer over the previous two seasons. This meant that the likes of Joseph O’Brien, who mostly plies his trade on the Flat these days, could escape any sanction on his jumps runners, yet he trains the very type of high-end jumps horses that the series was meant to protect the smaller yards from encountering.

Joseph O’Brien has the same number of Grade One entries for the Leopardstown events as both Henry De Bromhead and the combined entries of all UK-based trainers. They all have 6 each.

The UK entries for these Grade One races have been made by James Owens, Warren Greatrex (2), Patrick Neville, Harry Fry and Fergal O’Brien. It is significant that O’Brien is the only one of that quintet that finished in the top 15 in the UK Trainers’ Championship last season. The likes of Dan Skelton, Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls have swerved the event once again.

Last year there were only 3 UK-trained runners across the two days of the Dublin Racing Festival and each of that trio raced in handicaps.

I certainly hope some of the UK entries for the Grade One races stand their ground this time around. Last year six of the eight Grade One contests had 6 or less runners, including just 2 runners in the €150,000 Ladbrokes Novices Chase won by Fact To File.

It is hard to bill the Dublin Racing Festival as an alternative to the Cheltenham Festival when many of the Grade One races are so poorly supported numerically.

That said, it remains one of the highlights of our National Hunt season and we are likely to get to see many stars of the sport put on a show over the two days including Galopin Des Champs going for a third straight victory in the Paddy Power Irish Gold Cup and the mouthwatering prospect of Brighterdaysahead, Lossiemouth and State Man taking each other on in the Irish Champion Hurdle.

It will be interesting to see how Leopardstown’s decision to make the event ticket-only works out for them and their customers. According to the racecourse this decision was made “as a direct result of feedback that we have received from racegoers.”

I can’t imagine many racegoers directly suggesting that the event should be ticket-only, I presume this decision was made on the back of feedback from racegoers expressing their dissatisfaction at the queues they encountered for bars and toilets at last year’s event.

By all accounts most of those problems have been addressed and the Christmas Festival at the course ran smoothly last month.

The Dublin Racing Festival has been a tremendous success for the sport in Ireland and drew a record crowd of 20,000 on the opening day last year. According to the racecourse 38% of all attendees over the two days in 2024 travelled from Britain which is quite an incredible achievement.

Of course all of this success is primarily based on the prospect of seeing the very best National Hunt horses compete across the two days. It must therefore be more than a little concerning for the organisers that they are so dependent on the decisions of Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott to achieve this.

While Mullins and Elliott account for two-thirds of all the Grade One entries over the two days, their horses probably represent closer to 90% of the contenders for those eight races.

Outside of those two yards there are only a handful of high-quality horses spread around the rest of the country, and with no interest from the big yards in Britain in running horses at the event, the success of the Dublin Racing Festival hinges on Mullins and Elliott running their best horses.

About Vincent Finegan
Vincent, who lives on the Curragh in Co. Kildare, is the editor of irishracing.com and has almost 40 years experience in the horse racing industry. He writes a weekly blog on this website covering all aspects of the sport and presents our Irish Angle video show on Mondays. He is a dual winner of The Irish Field naps table.