In the past decade, the Irish Independent Leading Trainer Award at the Cheltenham Festival has been presented to just four men, Gordon Elliott, Willie Mullins, Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls. Collectively, in their careers as a whole, they have saddled 186 winners at the March showpiece meeting, but, while it’s hard to imagine, there was a time, in living memory, when their aggregate total was absolute, stone-cold zero.
On the eve of the Cheltenham Festival in 1985, Nicky Henderson had yet to shed his maiden tag, having saddled the beaten favourite, See You Then, in the Triumph Hurdle in 1984 and lost another promising young horse, Childown – who broke a leg at the second flight – in the same race. However, he wasted little time in doing so, saddling See You Then to win the Champion Hurdle – the first of three consecutive wins for the fragile, but highly talented, gelding – The Tsarevich to win the Mildmay of Flete Challenge Cup and First Bout to win the Triumph Hurdle. In fact, those three winners were enough to make Henderson leading trainer at the Festival for the first time.
Willie Mullins – currently the most successful trainer in the history of the Cheltenham Festival with 61 winners – began training, in his own right, in 1988, but didn’t break his duck at the Festival until 1995. His initial success came courtesy of Tourist Attraction in the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle but, despite building a reputation as a ‘specialist’ in the Champion Bumper – which he won half a dozen times over the next dozen years – he did not become leading trainer at the Festival for the first time until 2011.
Paul Nicholls was still riding, as stable jockey to David Barons, when Mullins took out a training licence. Indeed, that very same year he rode the unsuccessful favourite, Playschool, trained by Barons, in the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Nicholls joined the training ranks in 1991 and, although it took him some time to announce his arrival, in 1999, he saddled Flagship Uberalles to win the Arkle Challenge Trophy, Call Equiname to win the Queen Mother Champion Chase and See More Business to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
Gordon Elliott, by contrast, is a relative newcomer to the training ranks, having first taken out a licence in 2006. Remarkably, he saddled the winner of the Grand National, Silver Birch, in 2007, before he had saddled a winner in his native Ireland and nearly four years before he saddled his first winner at the Cheltenham Festival. He opened his account at the Festival with Chicago Grey in the National Hunt Chase in 2011, but in seven years since has added a further 21 to his winning tally, including six in 2017 and a record-equalling eight in 2018.