Willie Mullins and the Triumph Hurdle: How Closutton Built a Five-Year Streak

Willie Mullins has won five of the last six Triumph Hurdles by treating the race not as a single bet but as a portfolio play. While other trainers send one or two carefully chosen contenders, Mullins fields squads — sometimes double figures — recruited through a pipeline that starts in French bumpers and Auteuil maiden hurdles. The result is a dominance so complete that betting on the Triumph Hurdle now requires answering one question before any other: which Mullins runner is the right one?

The Numbers: Mullins’s Triumph Hurdle Record

Mullins’s first Triumph Hurdle victory came with Scolardy in 2002, an isolated success that would not be repeated for eighteen years. Then the streak started. Burning Victory in 2020 benefited from Goshen’s final-flight unseating, but the filly was travelling well enough to have placed regardless. Vauban in 2022 announced himself as a future star by powering clear despite clattering the last hurdle. Lossiemouth in 2023 led home a Closutton-trained one-two-three-four — an extraordinary achievement in any Grade 1, let alone a Cheltenham Festival race. Majborough followed in 2026 at 6/1, and then Poniros delivered the most improbable chapter of all in 2026: a 100/1 outsider, making his hurdling debut, denying his own stablemate Lulamba in the shadows of the post.

Six wins in total. Five in six years. Four consecutive from 2022 to 2026. The only interruption was 2021, when Quilixios won for Henry de Bromhead — a horse who had been trained by Gordon Elliott until weeks before the Festival and whose preparation owed little to Closutton’s methodology. Even in the one year Mullins did not win, his runners filled the places behind the winner.

The Recruitment Strategy: France to Ireland

The foundation of Mullins’s Triumph Hurdle operation is recruitment from France. Eleven of the last sixteen Triumph Hurdle winners were French imports, and Mullins has been the most aggressive buyer in that market. The pipeline works like this: agents identify promising young horses competing in French flat races, bumpers or early-season hurdles at Auteuil. Mullins and his principal owners — JP McManus, Rich Ricci, the H O S Syndicate — purchase them privately or at auction, typically between late summer and early winter.

The horses arrive at Closutton with a flat racing foundation but limited or no hurdling experience. Mullins’s team transitions them to Irish hurdle racing through carefully staged introductions, often starting with a maiden hurdle at a minor track in November or December. The best of them are then aimed at the Spring Juvenile Hurdle at Leopardstown’s Dublin Racing Festival in February — the key staging post before Cheltenham.

This system is expensive. Minella Academy was purchased for £370,000 after a single bumper win in Cork. Selma De Vary was acquired by Rich Ricci following an emphatic Auteuil victory. These are not speculative buys at the lower end of the market — they are targeted investments by owners willing to spend six figures on untested horses in the hope that one of them turns out to be a Grade 1 animal by March. The overall horse population in British and Irish racing continues to shrink — the number of horses in training in Britain fell to 21,728 in 2026, according to the BHA’s annual Racing Report, a decline of 2.3 per cent. Against that backdrop, Mullins’s ability to recruit from the deeper French pool gives him a structural advantage that British trainers simply cannot match.

Multi-Runner Approach: Volume as Advantage

In the 2026 Triumph Hurdle, Mullins declared eleven of the seventeen runners. That is not a scatter-gun approach — it is calculated field manipulation. When one yard controls 65 per cent of the runners, the race dynamics change fundamentally. Mullins’s runners set the pace, dictate the fractions, and create scenarios where a second- or third-string horse can exploit the tactical confusion caused by the presence of multiple stablemates.

Poniros was the eleventh-choice Mullins runner in the betting that day. He had never jumped a hurdle in public. His jockey, Jonjo O’Neill Jr, had ridden without a Festival winner since Early Doors in 2019 before breaking that drought on Jagwar in the TrustATrader Plate Handicap Chase on the Thursday — the day before the Triumph. And yet the system produced a result that no individual selection process would have identified. The 2023 renewal was nearly as emphatic: Lossiemouth led home a Mullins one-two-three-four, with the trainer’s first four finishing in the exact order that internal stable assessments had predicted.

For bettors, this volume approach creates a specific problem. Backing the Mullins “first string” — typically the horse ridden by Paul Townend — has a solid record. But the value often lies elsewhere in the string. Townend’s mount in 2026 finished behind Poniros. In 2026, the retained JP McManus jockey Mark Walsh rode the winner Majborough rather than Townend. The jockey booking is a signal, but it is not infallible. It tells you who the stable thinks will win, not who actually will.

Betting Implications: How to Handle a Mullins-Dominated Field

The worst strategy is to ignore Mullins and hope a British-trained horse wins. It has happened once in six years. The second-worst strategy is to back the Mullins favourite at cramped odds, because the multi-runner dynamic means the favourite is more likely to be beaten by a stablemate than by a rival from another yard.

A more productive approach is to identify which Mullins runners have the profile that the race rewards. The trends point to: French-bred, previously raced at Auteuil or in an Irish maiden hurdle, ideally with a run at Leopardstown’s Dublin Racing Festival in February, carrying an official rating of 140 or above. If two or three Mullins entries match that profile, an each-way bet on the second or third in the betting provides exposure to the Closutton machine at a price that accounts for the stablemate risk.

Watch the jockey allocation carefully in the days after declarations. Mullins operates a hierarchy: Townend gets first pick, then Patrick Mullins, then Danny Mullins, then allocated riders for McManus-owned horses. If Townend switches mounts between Tuesday and Friday — which he has done in previous years — that late change carries more informational weight than any pre-race interview. It means the stable has reassessed after seeing how the Festival is running and has made a calculated adjustment.

Finally, consider the fillies’ allowance. Lossiemouth exploited it brilliantly in 2023. Mullins has shown a willingness to target the Triumph with fillies who receive a seven-pound pull, and when those fillies have also trialled at Leopardstown, the combination of weight advantage and proven form creates a selection profile that the market often undervalues because the headline attention goes to the colts.

The Horserace Betting Levy Board reported a record yield of approximately £108 to £109 million for the year ending March 2026. A significant portion of that levy derives from Cheltenham Festival betting, and the Triumph Hurdle’s increasing predictability around Mullins’s involvement is one reason why bookmaker margins on this race remain healthy — punters keep backing the obvious horse at short prices while the less obvious stablemate delivers the upset. Understanding the structure of Mullins’s operation is the first step toward not being on the wrong end of that equation.