It’s just 5-1 Willie Mullins wins every Grade One race at this weekend’s Dublin Racing Festival (DRF). Since jump racing’s dominant figure managed the feat a year ago and is overwhelmingly represented again, it’s no stretch to argue that bookmakers could wind up relying on Gavin Cromwell to do them a favour.
It’s come to something when the trainer lying third in Ireland’s trainers’ championship finds himself in an underdog role at one of the biggest festivals of the year, but it is the reality. The DRF is Mullins’s patch. He has won 47 DRF races in its seven-year history. A whopping 34 of them have been Grade Ones. Last year nine of the 15 races at the E2 million meeting went to Mullins.
Even old rival Gordon Elliott has baulked somewhat at taking him on this weekend. Two of his best horses, Brighterdaysahead and Romeo Coolio, skip Ireland’s biggest Cheltenham Trials to wait for the main event in Gloucestershire. It leaves meaningful opposition looking thin on the ground.
That’s where Cromwell comes in. He has a genuine Grade One candidate in Hello Neighbour, one of the big fancies for today’s Gannon’s Juvenile Hurdle. In a scenario where Mullins has seven clear favourites in the other Grade Ones, including a handful at odds-on, it makes Cromwell’s horse a singular runner with realistic hopes of preventing another Mullins monopoly.
Any one-horse race is never a good look. There is no contradiction in appreciating Mullins’s unprecedented supremacy while aspiring towards a greater competitive spread. But Cromwell’s presence alone repudiates those throwing their hands up at how supposedly futile it is trying to break into the elite.
It’s just 10 years since the man juggling being a farrier with training a single horse found himself with an ordinary-looking juvenile filly called Jer’s Girl. From unpromising beginnings, she wound up winning a pair of Grade One races in JP McManus’s colours. It was an unlikely springboard that’s been used to the maximum. The shoeing was quickly sidelined.
In 2019, Espoir D’Allen won a Champion Hurdle. A few years later and the syndicate that ponied up to buy a €5,000 horse for sale on Facebook found themselves with a dual-Stayers Hurdle champion in Flooring Porter. A pair of Cheltenham victories last season brought Cromwell’s festival tally there to six.
His unlikely rise through the ranks mirrors his former employer, Elliott. It has been characterised by a flexibility of approach: if there’s a race in a horse, he’ll go anywhere to find it. In December that meant Bahrain where Snellen became the first Irish-trained winner on the island. She had previously been Cromwell’s second Royal Ascot winner from just three runners there.
Juggling the codes has hardly stalled a rapid rise up the jumping ranks. Horse Racing Ireland’s initiative last year to try to give smaller trainers a chance enabled Cromwell to rank among the sport’s top four trainers alongside Mullins, Elliott and Henry de Bromhead. This season, Cromwell is in advance of de Bromhead with 67 winners and €1.4 million in prize money so far.
“I won’t lie, the table absolutely is something I keep an eye on. I think everybody does, really,” says the 50-year-old who now oversees one of the biggest operations in the country, a long way from the time of Jer’s Girl. “It’s not something I think about, but it’s not something I forget either. But it’s so busy there’s no time to dwell on it. It’s not about the past, it’s about driving forward.”
At the DRF that means colliding into Mullins. For Hello Neighbour, there’s little alternative but to take in Saturday’s race en route to the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham. With just a single run over jumps under his belt — on top of two wins on the flat — the unbeaten four-year-old needs top-notch testing.
His successful jumping debut over Christmas eschewed the normal as he was pitched straight into Grade Two company. His inexperience was obvious with some sketchy jumping, but he still was able to beat Mullins’s Lady Vega Allen by a short head. The ambitious move is typical of Cromwell’s attitude to race planning.
“You have to think outside the box as best you can,” he says.
“There’s two ways of looking at the horse’s performance the last day. We want to right the things he did wrong, but he still managed to win with everything he did do wrong. The ability is there.
“He’ll run in a hood, and I think that will help to settle him. He just raced a bit gassy and a bit keen at Christmas. His jumping suffered a bit as a consequence. He just got a bit deep into a few hurdles. If we can get him to concentrate and relax a little bit, we think he’s well capable of doing it,” adds Cromwell.
Final Orders was a handicap winner from Cromwell at the DRF in 2023 and Perceval Legallois’ smooth success in the Paddy Power at Leopardstown over Christmas underlined how dangerous he can be in the lucrative non-Graded events.
The latter lines up over hurdles today, one of half a dozen Cromwell runners on Saturday’s programme. They also include Inothewayurthinkin, an Irish Gold Cup outsider.
Both horses are owned by McManus, one of the trainer’s biggest clients. But the trainer doesn’t go along with talk of the modern era ruling out fairy-tale outcomes such as the one with Jer’s Girl that propelled his own meteoric rise.
“The Dublin Racing Festival is a great weekend but it’s obviously very difficult to be competitive at it. We all know the firepower Willie has, and his domination of it in recent times. So, it’s understandable I suppose.
“Hello Neighbour has had only one run over hurdles so needs more experience. He’s probably the only horse I have that I can potentially take on Willie with, at the moment.
“But could a Jer’s Girl happen now? It absolutely could. It happened with Flooring Porter. I bought him myself as a store at the Land Rover Sale for just five grand. There will be more like that. There always are. They’re great stories and they are an important part of National Hunt racing,” he says.
“We have a filly going for the Mares Novice Hurdle at Cheltenham, Sixandahalf. She’s only a small little thing that wouldn’t have the credentials of a potential favourite for Cheltenham. But she’s there now as one of the favourites,” Cromwell adds.
Sixandahalf is the first horse for her syndicate ownership, won on the flat as well as in bumpers, and made an impressive winning debut over flights at Fairyhouse three weeks ago. Behind her was an odds-on Mullins favourite. It was a timely reminder that even the most unlikely David can still beat the Goliath.
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