Last week the preliminary entries were made for the eight Grade One races taking place at next month’s Dublin Racing Festival and not surprisingly they show how skewed the top end of the National Hunt game has become.

In total there were 118 entries for the Grade One contests and Willie Mullins, as you would predict, tops the poll with 47 of them. Gordon Elliott was responsible for a further 32 which means these two trainers account for some 66% of all the horses entered in the big races.

I'm from a little village in Wexford called Duncormick. My dad didn't ride horses, but he had a keen interest in pedigrees and watches a lot of racing. I probably started riding horses through my brother Sean who started before me. I saw Sean riding horses and enjoying it, and then he went on riding racehorses. I started riding and I broke into racehorses then with a local trainer down the road called John Walsh. Sean went away down to another trainer Michael Murphy. I was at my local riding lesson school and John Walsh came over to me and asked me if I wanted to come down on a Saturday. I went down and I loved it, so I went back and I went racing most Sundays when I was 11 or 12. The first day I went in there I was probably about 10 and I rode a horse that day. Her name was Mandy Carroll and she actually won a couple of point-to-points and a hunters chase on the track at Cork as well.