Cheltenham Festival: Galmoy the Irish saviour

It's not inconceivable that Ireland's champion trainer Willie Mullins could reach 100 Cheltenham Festival winners next week.

Mullins needs 12 to hit that astonishing landmark, but such a scenario is only a 5/2 shot with Paddy Power, which underlines the extraordinary firepower at the disposal of a trainer responsible for ten ante-post favourites and a host of other leading fancies.

Mullins saddled a record ten winners at last season's meeting to bring his overall tally to 88, including five on Cheltenham Gold Cup day when Irish trainers won all seven contests to take the Prestbury Cup 18-10 against their British counterparts.

That followed a 23-5 mauling in 2021, while you have to go back to 2015 to find the last time British-trained winners outnumbered the Irish at the Festival.

The landscape was very different, however, when Mullins started training in the late-80s.

In 1989 there was no Irish winner, which was the first time such an event had occurred since 1947, while in the two previous seasons only one horse - the same horse - had prevented the whitewash.

The Irish had two great champions in 1986, with Dawn Run, trained by Mullins' father Paddy, winning the Cheltenham Gold Cup after Buck House had won the Champion Chase for Mouse Morris.

However, just a couple of months after the pair met in a match at that season's Punchestown Festival both horses were dead, with colic claiming the life of Buck House and Dawn Run suffering a fatal fall in the French Champion Hurdle.

Ireland needed a new champion and it was Galmoy who stepped up to the mark, landing successive editions of the Stayers' Hurdle in 1987 and 1988.

Galmoy had been one of Ireland's leading novice hurdlers in 1984/85 and, after a short-lived switch to chasing, had shown himself to be one of the best staying hurdlers around the following season when landing a handicap at Punchestown by 12 lengths despite carrying top weight of 12 stone.

Trainer John Mulhern - the flamboyant businessman who would go on to marry Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey's daughter, Eimear - elected to gear Galmoy's campaign in the 1986/87 season around a crack at the Stayers' Hurdle, giving him a solitary prep run in the Boyne Hurdle beforehand.

Galmoy met with defeat in the Boyne against the novice Welcome Pin, but he was probably in need of the run on his comeback and confidence was high in the camp ahead of his trip to Cheltenham, where he would be one of 41 competitors trained in Ireland.

"He was working well at home and was doing things really good, so any bit of luck on our side and I thought he probably would win," recalls Tommy Carmody, the 1985 Irish Champion Jockey who would also claim the title in 1988.

Galmoy, the only Irish challenger in the 1987 Stayers' Hurdle, was sent off 9/2 second favourite behind 2/1 shot Aonoch, an impressive winner of the Rendlesham Hurdle on his previous start but who would be ridden by the owner's daughter who was unable to claim a 7 lb allowance.

Recounting how the race unfolded, Timeform's Chasers & Hurdlers of 1986/7 reads: The race was a slowly-run affair with two of the outsiders Dad's Gamble and Malford Lad making the running in the early stages. Galmoy was held up towards the rear of the fourteen-runner field until making smooth headway from halfway. He came through to lead three out, responded well when ridden along from the next and stayed on strongly to go clear on the run-in. He won by six lengths from Aonoch who was ridden by a 7-lb claimer unable to draw the allowance and who had run wide on the final bend.

Galmoy's performance was rated by Timeform as the best in the race since its inauguration in 1972 and he headed the betting to retain his crown the following year after a busier campaign which included a victory in the Boyne Hurdle on his start before the Festival.

At that time, when the Festival was a three-day affair with 18 races in total, the Stayers' Hurdle was the fourth contest on the opening afternoon. The Irish had rattled the crossbar in the opening three races at the meeting, finishing runner-up in the Supreme, Arkle and Champion Hurdle, but Galmoy was a 2/1 favourite for the Stayers' Hurdle and was expected to deliver.

Carmody insisted he wasn't feeling the pressure, however, and said: "I'd been riding a long time and was well used to pressure if there was such a thing. There was no pressure because I had great faith in the horse."

And that faith was rewarded with a resounding seven-length success.

Chasers & Hurdlers of 1987/8 reported: The main dangers to him in the sixteen-runner field appeared to be the much-improved Miss Nero, runaway winner of the Fernbank Hurdle at Ascot on her previous start, and Ten Plus, the best staying hurdler of the 1985/6 season returned to hurdling after failing to live up to expectations over fences.

Ten Plus made the running, increasing the pace going out on the final circuit, and with conditions very testing the race became a thorough test of stamina. Ten Plus was one of many who had had enough soon after Miss Nero pressed on five from home, chased by Galmoy who was having to be ridden along. The leading pair began to draw clear of the remainder on the long run to the third-last, with Miss Nero looking to be travelling the better, but now Galmoy was warming to his task and, after jumping this flight upsides, he began to assert his authority as Miss Nero came under pressure. Kept up to his work Galmoy drew away from between the last two flights, and passed the post seven lengths clear of Miss Nero, who in turn finished twelve lengths ahead of third-placed Bonanza Boy.

Alas, that was as good as it got for the Irish at the meeting, and the following year would be even worse as Galmoy - the only favourite among a team of just 31 - was unable to complete the hat-trick in the 1989 Stayers' Hurdle.

Galmoy, by this stage a world-weary ten-year-old, had to settle for second, 12 lengths behind Nicky Henderson's Rustle, but Carmody believes it could have been a different story had his request to fit blinkers been granted.

He said: "I'd asked my governor, John Mulhern, would he put blinkers on him. Not that he was rogue or anything, but he was so lackadaisical. He was thinking 'been there, done that, worn the t-shirt'.

"I asked him to put blinkers on and he said 'none of my horses will ever wear blinkers'.

"I came in and said 'he'd have won if he'd had blinkers on him'."

It was a case of what might have been, though, as by the time Galmoy was fitted with headgear in the 1990 Stayers' Hurdle - he wore a visor - he was past his best and only able to finish in mid-division behind his compatriot Trapper John. Still, in preventing whitewashes in 1987 and 1988 - as well as becoming the first back-to-back winner of the Stayers' Hurdle - he'd already secured his legacy.

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