A gloriously sunny day one of the Aintree Grand National festival left no one sweating more than Dan Skelton after a rampaging Willie Mullins pulled off a superb 102-1 Grade One four-timer.
Lossiemouth’s Aintree Hurdle success was the centrepiece of a top-flight streak in the first four races on Thursday that also saw Imparie Et Passe, Murcia and Gaelic Warrior score at the top level.
It catapulted Mullins Mullins back into the race to be crowned champion trainer in Britain again.
Grand National success and five Grade One victories at Aintree last season proved crucial to the Irishman becoming the first since Vincent O’Brien 70 years previously to be top trainer in Britain from this country.
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With six of the 34 runners declared for Saturday’s National, topped by the defending champion I Am Maximus, Mullins is zeroing in again on a perfectly timed late run for a contest that ends at Sandown in three weeks.
Skelton began the day as a near-unbackable 1-10 favourite for a first trainers’ title, holding a big lead over his compatriots Paul Nicholls and Nickey Henderson, and more than €1.7 million ahead of his Irish rival on prize money. He ended it with Mullins’s odds cut to 6-1 by some firms.
Once again, the half-million sterling first prize for the National shapes as being pivotal to the outcome.
Skelton had salt rubbed into the wound by Gaelic Warrior’s victory in the Brooklands Bowl as the Mullins second-string proved three lengths too good for the Englishman’s 9-4 favourite Grey Dawning.
Cross-channel morale wasn’t helped either by British jump racing’s headline act Constitution Hill falling for a second race in a row in the Aintree Hurdle.
Having tipped up in last month’s Champion Hurdle through carelessness, Constitution Hill looked to do the exact same thing again when taking a dramatic spill at the second-last flight.
How he might have fared had he stood up will never be known but having got pocketed on the turn into the straight, Nico de Boinville’s mount had got himself behind both his big Irish rivals Lossiemouth and Wodhooh and looked to have a mountain to climb.
“He is genuinely the best jumper you’ll ever see. But in that vocabulary, there is just what you would have called a one per cent chance of doing what he’s done. But he’s done it twice, which does worry you, of course it does. But how can you iron it out?” Constitution Hill’s trainer Nicky Henderson said.
“Nico said he’d been fantastic the whole way. At a couple of hurdles he went in short and that’s what we’ve been trying to get him to do, but when you’re going to three out and racing like that you can’t afford to do that, you’ve got to go, and Nico said he just came up too soon.
“Nico said he was full of running and his words to me were that he actually had Lossiemouth where he wanted her. He was happy with her in front rather than behind,” he added.
Nevertheless, it was Lossiemouth who took full advantage to complete a spectacular run of four Grade One races in a row for her trainer. Mullins was already formulating Punchestown plans for later this month and suggested the mare could race against her own sex there, possibly leaving State Man to tackle Constitution Hill should the latter travel.
That is far less of an imponderable than trying to guess which version of Gaelic Warrior can turn up these days.
Discarded by Paul Townend in favour of Embassy Gardens, who was pulled up lame early, Gaelic Warrior was on his best behaviour under Patrick Mullins, who won on his first ride over Aintree’s Mildmay fences.
“It was a pleasant surprise when I was allowed to ride him because Paul chose to ride Embassy Gardens. He settled fantastic and jumped really well and pretty straight. We thought he’d stay because he won over three miles as a novice hurdler, but you don’t really know until you try it in open class,” said the first amateur rider to win Liverpool’s ‘Gold Cup’.
Lossiemouth and Gaelic Warrior completed a double for owner Rich Ricci, although he lost his runner Willy De Houelle who sustained fatal injuries in a fall in the Juvenile Hurdle won by Murcia.
That well-backed filly stepped up massively on her Cheltenham effort behind Putyourhandstogether who could finish only third.
“I wasn’t expecting that!” Mullins admitted. “I was hoping she’d finish in the first four – you never know, looking at the drama in jump racing, between Cheltenham and whatever – anything can happen, and if you’re not in it you can’t win it.”
The comment could also apply to a race for the British trainers’ title that looked all but over but now looks anything but.
