Dawn Run’s trainer Paddy Mullins dies aged 91
The word legend has become somewhat devalued in an age when the second-rate are worshipped at the altar of mediocrity but Paddy Mullins deserved such an epithet.
The trainer, who died on Thursday morning at the age of 91, was one of the leading figures in Irish racing during his 52-year career and will be best remembered for his two Cheltenham Festival victories with the iconic mare Dawn Run, even though Mullins held another winner in higher esteem.
The list of glittering prizes that Mullins won during his life deliver a compelling testimony to his talent, and the key to that success was based in his deep-rooted sense of horsemanship. “I let the horse tell me what it is capable of,” he once said. “My aim is to do the best I can with them.”
One story from the early days gives a clue to his empathy with his horses. One of them, who had an uneasy temperament, had grabbed Mullins by the shoulder of his jacket. Despite being able to feel the horse’s teeth, Mullins just kept talking to the horse for the next couple of hours until he let go.
Despite the old-style horse sense, Mullins was quick to adapt to new ideas as Noel Meade pointed out: “He was a genius of a horseman and he probably changed the system of training in Ireland with the interval training he pioneered.”
Mullins also trod uncharted territory when he won both the Champion Hurdle in 1984 and the Cheltenham Gold Cup two years later with Dawn Run.
She was the first, and so far only, horse to win both races after a string of fine two-mile hurdlers found the stretch to three-and-a-quarter miles over fences just too much. An injury following her first start in a novice chase, which she had won, meant that she did not run again that season and went to the Gold Cup in 1986 with just a handful of runs over fences as experience.
Jonjo O’Neill was starting to feel the weight of the world on his shoulders before he went out to ride until he spoke to Mullins. “Dawn Run was sent off the 15-8 favourite for the Gold Cup and was the best horse in the race, but I was worried that her jumping might be found out at that level,” he later recalled. “The extent of Paddy's riding orders was: ‘The mare is well. You know yourself what to do.’ That was it and it suited me fine.”
What followed is now part of jumping folklore as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC9dRA15F9s and head the six Festival winners that Mullins trained along with Herring Gull (Totalisator Champion Novices' Chase in 1968), Counsel Cottage (Sun Alliance Hurdle in 1977), Hazy Dawn and Macks Friendly (National Hunt Chase in 1982 and 1984).
Mullins also won four Irish Grand National winners - Vulpine 1967, Herring Gull 1968, Dim Wit 1972 and Luska 1981 - and in 2003, at the age of 84, Mullins enjoyed an Indian summer with victories in the Irish Oaks with Vintage Tipple, which was a first Classic winner, and a third Galway Plate with Nearly A Moose. Aside from those another stand-out moment was Grabel's victory in the valuable International Hurdle at the Dueling Grounds in Kentucky in 1990 but it was another winner that always stood out for Mullins.
Hurry Harriet had won the Group Two Stakes at the Curragh in the summer of 1973 but Mullins knew she had an even bigger race in her. So he persevered as she finished third to Dahlia in the Irish Oaks and second to Allez France in the Prix Vermeille. Even a poor run in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, when she was only 19th, did not deter Mullins and his reward came when Hurry Harriet won the Champion Stakes at Newmarket.
“That race was the highlight of my career, as she beat the best filly in Europe, Allez France,” he said years later. “Dawn Run was another great mare, having won the Champion Hurdle in 1984 before going back to win the Gold Cup two years later.
"Hurry Harriet had the class."
There are plenty of people who think Mullins had the same.
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