Willie Mullins and JP McManus© Photo Healy Racing
The dynamic between racehorse owners and their trainers is fascinating. You would presume that owners employ logic when determining who will train their horse, but often that decision has little to do with value for money or indeed the prospect of success.
In many cases owners pick their trainers in the same way they would the family butcher or hairdresser or car dealer or even the football club they support. They go with the one their parents went with before them or someone that is local to them or that they know personally.
You hear many stories of owners being with the same trainer throughout their careers, and in some cases they can go years without ever having a winner. But this doesn’t deter them.
Some owners are with the one yard so long that they are now on the second generation of trainer, as a son or daughter has taken over the licence.
I suppose if everything was purely down to economic factors and the realistic chances of winning races the vast majority of trainers simply wouldn’t survive.
There is of course another cohort of owners that are solely interested in success and these are the ones that are driving the imbalance in the National Hunt side of the sport where the vast majority of the best horses are now concentrated in just four yards.
The relationships between these leading racehorse trainers and their success-hungry owners must be some of the most precarious in all of sport.
Take the recent announcement by owners Simon Munir and Isaac Souede that JJ Slevin has been appointed as their “retained jockey in Ireland and England.”
You would automatically presume that JJ would have the pick of the ‘Double Green’ horses in all races run in either country, but within 24 hours of the statement from the owners it became apparent that his role would not extend to the horses they have in training with Willie Mullins.
Two of the owners’ high-profile horses with Mullins, Fun Fun Fun and Jasmin De Vaux that ran at Naas on Sunday, were jocked-up with Patrick Mullins and Paul Townend respectively, despite Slevin not only being available, but booked to ride at the same meeting.
It’s difficult to know whether or not JJ Slevin was made aware of this complication when appointed to his new role. In a recent interview with the Irish Field Newspaper Slevin talked about how his weekly schedule shouldn’t change much now that he has his new job, with the exception that he will now be “going into Willie’s to ride work.”
Not much point in going there to ride work if you are never going to ride the horses in their races.
It was also interesting that the owners made the point to specify in their statement about Slevin’s appointment that Bryony Frost would ride their horses in France, but did not mention anything about who would ride their horses in Willie Mullins’ yard.
It seems most likely that the decision to leave Slevin off the Mullins horses was made by the trainer rather than the owners and if that is the case it must be a tricky one for him to justify.
How do you tell one set of owners that they cannot use their retained jockey on the horses in your yard when you already let another owner, JP McManus, use his own riders on all the horses you train for him?
These mega rich owners are used to getting their own way in almost every area of their lives, so having to kowtow to their racehorse trainer can’t come easy, but I suppose as long as the horses are winning races these relationships remain intact.
Another side to the precarious balance between owners and trainers is evident in the intended Cheltenham target for Brighterdaysahead. Trainer Gordon Elliott would without question run the star mare in the Champion Hurdle if the decision was solely left to him. It’s the logical target for a mare that has beaten the reigning Champion Hurdler on her last two starts and looks to be going from strength to strength.
Owner Michael O’Leary and his brother Eddie have indicated that the Mares’ Hurdle is her intended target, with the latter stating: “I’d go for the Mares’ Hurdle every day of the week.”
If Michael O’Leary was happy to swerve a record-equaling bid for a third Grand National with Tiger Roll in 2021 over a disagreement about the horse’s handicap rating, there is enough reason to suspect Brighterdaysahead may well take the lesser option at Cheltenham this time around, regardless of the trainer’s opinion.
Another intriguing aspect of the relationships that exist between owners and trainers is that JP McManus has agreed to leave his latest big-money purchase, The New Lion, in training with Dan Skelton and allow Harry Skelton to keep the ride as per the wishes of the horse’s former owner Darren Yates.
It was probably an easy request for McManus to accede to as the Skeltons have done a terrific job with The New Lion thus far. In just four racecourse starts he has gone from a lowly Market Rasen Bumper victory to become a Grade One winning hurdler and the future looks very bright for the son of Kayf Tara.
With The New Lion currently towards the head of the antepost markets for two of the Novice Hurdles at Cheltenham and other British-trained horses such as Sir Gino, Constitution Hill and Jonbon short for other Grade One contests it might not be a foregone conclusion that the Irish-trained runners will dominate at the Festival this time around.
As three out of the four above named British-trained horses are Irish-owned it once again shows how it is the will of these rich owners that shape the sport as much as the the dominance of just four Irish trainers which tends to grab all the headlines.
Of course owner JP McManus has the power to be king maker in all of this, if he decided to move all his horses to just one trainer in the morning, there’d be every chance that trainer would be Champion at the end of the season. But for reasons only known to himself he prefers to spread his ammunition around, which to no small degree keeps many of the lesser operations in business.