Leopardstown staged its two-day Dublin Racing Festival on Sunday and Monday, but with no runners from Great Britain in attendance, despite its proximity to the Emerald Isle.
Last weekend’s Dublin Racing Festival, despite its weather-enforced reworking (it moved the first card from Saturday to Monday, with day two’s card sticking to Sunday) was another triumph for the indefatigable powerhouse of Irish National Hunt racing.
Crowd figures were capped at 18,500 last year, so popular had Leopardstown’s ‘mini-Cheltenham Festival’ become, the popularity surely aided by Irish jumping having settled into its zenith.
Gavin Cromwell, Gordon Elliott, Henry de Bromhead and Willie Mullins (mostly Mullins) have for years appeared all but blasé about their annual invasions of the real Cheltenham Festival and Aintree’s Grand National Festival in April. They plunder imperiously anything they can lay claim to.
On home soil for Sunday and Monday’s eight Dublin Grade 1s, the juggernauts seemed almost impregnable, but if Great British trainers were running scared, fear of thrashings or undue pre-Cheltenham exposure shouldn’t be permitted as excuses. The Cheltenham Festival still lies more than a month away.
Warren Greatrex is the sole Great British-based trainer to have secured a current Grade 1 during an edition of the Dublin Racing Festival, thanks to La Bague Au Roi in 2019’s Flogas (now Ladbrokes Novice) Chase.
But he’s not the only British trainer to have given Irish colleagues a kicking in their country. Only last year, Rebecca Curtis sent out Haiti Couleurs (due to line up in Dublin last weekend, but for bad weather leading to an abandonment of travel plans) to win an Irish Grand National.
At Punchestown the following month, Lulamba handed Nicky Henderson another Irish Grade 1 (he’d already collected plenty, not least a Savills Chase, a Punchestown Champion Hurdle and two Punchestown Champion Chases).
Back home, Henderson’s National Hunt scene hasn’t been entirely overwhelmed by supposed Irish dominance, even if Willie Mullins has for two years claimed its champion jumps trainer crown, dismissing the determined efforts of Dan Skelton, Paul Nicholls et al. The exploits of one trainer and a collection of his high-flying compatriots shouldn’t be conflated with the exploits of an entire nation.
Great Britain keeps more than 5,000 jumpers in training. Tracks in its borders host the Cheltenham Gold Cup, Grand National and King George VI Chase, more prestigious prizes than anything Ireland can muster.
From May, JP McManus, that preeminent stalwart of an Irish National Hunt owner, will employ the services of rider over the water, Harry Cobden, as his primary jockey.
Ruby Walsh, Barry Geraghty and Mick Fitzgerald were all based in Great Britain for large chunks of their careers.
Their principal employers – Paul Nicholls in the case of Ruby Walsh; Nicky Henderson in the case of Geraghty and Fitzgerald – remain bulldozers of jump racing who, until Mullins bagged his two titles, swapped the British champion jumps trainer title between them for nearly two decades.
Corkman Jonjo O’Neill trains from Jackdaws Castle in the Cotswolds. Fifteen miles away lies the yard of Limerickman Fergal O’Brien.
As British racegoers commandeer budget flights to Dublin next year, impressionable to a narrative that Irish jump racing has it better, they should bear in mind that it’s to Great Britain that Irish trainers must traipse in search of jumping’s highest accolades.
"As British racegoers commandeer budget flights to Dublin next year, impressionable to a narrative that Irish jump racing has it better, they should bear in mind that it’s to Great Britain that Irish trainers must traipse in search of jumping’s highest accolades."
Not that that’s reason for its trainers to stay put, content with pickings in their homeland.
Just as Irish racegoers travel en masse to Cheltenham in support of their heroes (as well as, presumably, to catch sight of the leading contenders of another land), so must already plentiful Great British racegoers at Irish festivals be provided compatriot horses to cheer on.
Trainers of Great Britian, follow your fellow countrymen and women in the spectator ranks. They’ll meet you at the Dublin Racing Festival for its tenth edition next year.
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