Willie Mullins, the Irish champion, became the first trainer to win four grade one races on a day of the Cheltenham Festival yesterday. Bookmakers, however, claim they were saved from a £40 million payout, potentially the biggest racing loss in history, when the fall of Annie Power, ridden by Ruby Walsh, wrecked thousands of accumulator bets on four Mullins-trained favourites.
Cheltenham is perennially the theatre of the unexpected but the domination of Mullins was signposted for several weeks. The in-built hazards of jump racing militate against predictable results but, shortly after 4pm, Annie Power was storming to the final flight of the mares’ hurdle with a fortune resting on one jump.
Douvan, Un De Sceaux and Faugheen had won their respective races under Walsh, the stable jockey, with authority, Faugheen leading an unprecedented 1-2-3 for the Mullins stable in the Stan James Champion Hurdle. Annie Power was odds-on to complete the four-timer and bring the betting industry to its knees.
Despite her dramatic fall, from which both she and Walsh rose uninjured, the race still went to Mullins through his second string, Glens Melody. This, though, suited the bookmakers far more than the punters.
David Williams, of Ladbrokes, said: “If Annie Power had jumped the last and won, the industry would have faced losses of £50 million. It’s generally reckoned that we lost £40 million when Frankie Dettori won all seven races at Ascot in 1996, so this would have been the worst day ever.
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“The four Mullins horses were flagged up so far out from the meeting that accumulators were very popular. Our position on the single winners was lousy and we have still paid out around £10 million. But we’ve just had a bad day at the office, nothing more.”
More than 63,000 packed into Cheltenham, a record first-day crowd and a proper test for the revamped facilities due for completion next year with the opening of a new grandstand.
The atmosphere was brought to boiling point by Mullins’s rare command of a day at the most demanding of meetings. Last night, he claimed it had not occurred to him that he was making history. “I didn’t realise that none of this had been done before,” he said. “The four grade ones will take a bit of absorbing and to have the first three in the Champion Hurdle was beyond anything I had imagined.”