Champion trainer Willie Mullins has entered nine horses for the Boodles Cheltenham Gold Cup 2026, and his son and assistant trainer Patrick Mullins highlights Gaelic Warrior as his pick of the bunch.
“I’d love to ride Gaelic Warrior, I think he’d win the Gold Cup,” says amateur rider Patrick, who won the Grand National last year with Nick Rockett. “I’ve ridden a lot of horses in my life, the feeling he gives is pure strength, and it’s that strength that makes me think he could win.
“It’s a cliché but he’d run through a brick wall – he’s like a tank.”
“Like a tank”: Gaelic Warrior’s greatest asset is his bottomless strength.
(Image credit: Alamy)
Patrick rides Gaelic Warrior at home and describes him as “always leaning on you, always wants to be in conversation”.
“He can hang and run a bit keen at times, he’s complicated, but while some horses would annoy you, he doesn’t annoy me because you can have a conversation with him,” he says.
“Our gallop is bottomless and he just goes through it so easily. After every race he’s fresh – nothing knocks him or fazes him.”
Thankfully, he never throws his weight around in the stable – though it takes two people to lead him up at the races.
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“He’s a funny horse, if he was a human he wouldn’t know how strong he is,” Patrick adds. “He has a bit of wild eye and he’s a bit turned in – he’s not an oil painting, but he does the job.
“He looks big – he’s 16.3hh – but in the stable he’s quite relaxed. But he has this persona in his races of being very difficult to ride and he is. He was born with this energy. You need to know him, that’s all.”
Why Gaelic Warrior could win at Cheltenham 2026
The eight-year-old has a superb record, only finishing out of the first three once (sixth) in 20 completed races. He racked up three in a row last season, and won the Arkle at the Cheltenham Festival by 8½ lengths two years ago.
Cheltenham form: Gaelic Warrior wins the Arkle Chase at the Festival in 2024.
“I thought he’d win there too,” admits Patrick, before pointing out that the horse’s form outside of Leopardstown is considerably better than his form at Leopardstown. “In technical terms, in Cheltenham and Aintree and Kempton, where he ran well, there’s a constant inside running rail, and the field races quite tight, so you can park him in on horses’ tails and he relaxes, when he can’t see any daylight.
“At Leopardstown, there’s no inch of running rail, so the field is always spreading out and there’s daylight. Whenever he sees daylight he says I wanna go faster! He is strong, and when he wants to go there’s not much I can do about it. But if you know him well enough, you can distract him – you can’t force him to slow down.”
Of course, with Willie Mullins having some 87 entries across the board, several in multiple races and numerous key contenders, all this conjecturing could be academic. Gaelic Warrior is currently vying for favouritism for the Ryanair Chase with Fact To File – who may yet himself be supplemented at a cost of £25,000 for the Gold Cup, for which the latter is favourite despite the lack of entry. Gaelic Warrior is entered in both – and it’s Willie’s decision which of his jockeys rides which horse.
But Patrick has laid down his cards as the horse he is keen to ride in the big one as he bids to add the Gold Cup to a CV that is impressive by any standards, let alone as an amateur rider.
He adds: “If I could choose one, the Grand National would be the one and always was because of the history – but Sam Waley-Cohen won both so let’s try to match him!”
Martha is an experienced journalist who is mad-keen on horses and dogs. Her reporting CV includes the Paris Olympics, European championships, Aachen World Equestrian Festival and World Cup finals. After growing up with assorted liver and white springer spaniels, she enjoyed 14 years with two rescue dogs. Now, her constant companion is Fidget, an extremely energetic and habitually muddy black and white springer. Martha has written on topics as diverse as a top horse’s clone to the best GPS trackers for dogs, as well as equestrian and rural matters for Country Life, The Field, The Times, The Spectator and The Telegraph alongside Horse & Hound.
