“It’s done but not quite dusted yet,” was Willie Mullins’s assessment earlier this week of the race for the National Hunt trainers’ championship, but he knows as well as anyone that the title is as good as won. Six weeks on from one historic achievement, when he became the first trainer to saddle 100 Cheltenham Festival winners, another beckons. Jump racing feels like Willie’s World now, and the rest of us are just living in it.
Once the final seven events of the 2023-24 season have been run at Sandown Park on Saturday, the winners of about 99.3% of the 3,500 races will have been saddled by someone else. Mullins, though, will have taken enough of the races that really matter – including nine at the Cheltenham Festival and both the English and Scottish Grand Nationals – to be confirmed as the first trainer based in Ireland to win the title since Vincent O’Brien in 1954.
