A crammed schedule of Christmas racing action starts on St Stephen’s Day with champion trainer Willie Mullins in the unusual position of hoping for a festive form boost.
The sport’s dominant figure has made 10 declarations at home with another three at Kempton, including both Fact To File and Gaelic Warrior for the Ladbrokes King George VI Chase. Last year’s winner, Banbridge, will also line up for Joseph O’Brien.
St Stephen’s Day is Ireland’s busiest schedule of the racing year. Leopardstown and Limerick each start four days of festival action and Down Royal takes place too. Official attendances of close to 90,000 are expected during the holiday period with extensive TV coverage on RTÉ 2.
The reinstated €100,000 Racing Post Novice Chase is Leopardstown’s highlight on Friday, one of the Grade One holiday highlights contributing to an overall festival prize fund of close on €1.5 million at the Foxrock track.
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Ordinarily, Christmas racegoers might presume Mullins is the figure to deliver them festival joy. However, his string is hardly approaching one of the biggest festivals of the year in sparkling form.
Just one of his last 24 runners has won. The Mullins strike rate in the last three weeks is at 13 per cent. It can operate at more than double that. There’s also last year’s Christmas tally of seven winners, a sharp slide on 16 the year before. All of it is a long way off a remarkable holiday tally of 22 winners from 50 runners in 2016.
It could reflect how Mullins increasingly always has an eye on closing out the season in style at the lucrative spring festivals. But there is a sense that the most powerful operation ever built in National Hunt racing is far from firing on all cylinders right now.
The opposite is true of Mullins’s rival Gordon Elliott. He’s operating at a 25 per cent strike rate and is closing in on €2.5 million in prize money in Ireland already this season. He was also top trainer at Leopardstown last year with seven winners across the four days.
Elliott’s nine St Stephen’s Day starters at Leopardstown include the exciting Romeo Coolio, odds on to extend his unbeaten record over fences in the big race due off at 2.20pm.
The frantic festive schedule is such that the King George is off 10 minutes after that, with hopes high of a fourth Irish success in five years in the Kempton spectacular. Tornado Flyer in 2021 was Mullins’s second winner of the race after Florida Pearl two decades previously.
Another clash between Gaelic Warrior and Fact To File is one of the most eagerly anticipated features of the Christmas action following their epic head-to-head in last month’s John Durkan at Punchestown. A neck separated the pair at the end of a gruelling battle.
A first-time visor is applied to Banbridge, who overhauled Il Est Francais in dramatic style a year ago. British champion jockey Sean Bowen rides the O’Brien runner for the first time.
Heading the home team are last year’s novices Jango Baie and The Jukebox Man, the latter carrying the colours of the former Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp.
Mullins runs Kitzbuhel in the earlier Kauto Star Chase at Kempton on a card that sees the exciting Sir Gino return to action in the Christmas Hurdle following a life-threatening illness.
With champion jockey Paul Townend on duty at Kempton, Danny Mullins steps in for some of his uncle’s main hopes at Leopardstown.
They include Salvator Mundi, who takes on Romeo Coolio in the big novice event, and Narciso Has in the Grade Two Changing Times Juvenile Hurdle. The Lingfield Derby Trial winner Puppet Master makes his jumping debut in this. Elliott’s Barbizon could be tough to beat on the back of his own impressive introduction to the winter game last month.
Selective watering continues on Leopardstown’s famously quick draining steeplechase track but no such measures will be necessary at Limerick, where it is heavy.
Greenmount Park’s Grade Two feature on Friday is the Defender Novice Hurdle which has luminaries such as Faugheen and Penhill on its roll of honour. Elliott has two of the six runners, although the going could prove a plus for JJ Slevin’s mount Yeshil. He won his maiden at Punchestown despite some sloppy jumping.
Happy Dreams is a four-time winner at Limerick and lines up in a handicap chase off a mark of 107 that looks exploitable.
With so many driving home for Christmas, plenty might feel for Cork trainer Terence O’Brien, whose sole runner on St Stephen’s Day, Con’s Roc, is due to line up at Down Royal. It’s over 400km from O’Brien’s Carrigtwohill stables to the Lisburn track but it looks like it could prove a very worthwhile trek.
The eight-year-old has run just twice on a racecourse, and four times in point-to-points, with O’Brien explaining it was largely due to an undiagnosed stress fracture eventually uncovered by an MRI.
The new version of Con’s Roc returned in style at Fairyhouse last month in a performance that put him towards the head of the Hunters’ Chase market at Cheltenham in March. He can cement that place in Down Royal’s Hunters’ Chase.
