The Galway festival kicks off on Monday evening with all the usual attendant fanfare that goes with Irish racing’s most distinctive meeting.
As usual much of the seven days at Ballybrit overlaps with elite cross-channel action in Goodwood. But whereas Goodwood labels itself “Glorious”, Galway likes to regard itself in rather more Australian “fair go” terms.
Tradition has it that the next seven days enable racing’s little guys to have a shot at scooping some of the €2.1 million in prize money on offer for the 53 races up for grabs.
The most prized of them are Wednesday’s Tote Galway Plate while the following day sees the Guinness Hurdle. Each of them is worth €270,000.
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A notable statistic from last year that added substance to Galway’s more egalitarian credentials was how no owner, trainer or jockey won more than one of the seven feature races throughout the week.
It didn’t stop the all-conquering Willie Mullins from being the leading trainer for an eighth year in a row with 10 winners across the flat and his more usual National Hunt terrain. They included Zarak The Brave who gave him a third Galway Hurdle in four years.
Mullins’s great rival Gordon Elliott won another Galway Plate with Ash Tree Meadow and he is topweight for a potential repeat this Wednesday. Should Elliott win again it will be a record fifth success in the midsummer steeplechase highlight.
If the €850 bargain buy Hewick was something of a fairy-tale Plate winner a couple of years ago, it requires going back to Missunited over a decade ago in 2013 to find a similar feel-good outcome to the big hurdle.
The humdrum reality often is that getting a look in on the big stage boils down to how Mullins, Elliott, and big guns on the flat such as Aidan O’Brien have little interest in some of the more ordinary races that pad out the week.
It’s a context underpinning Horse Racing Ireland’s plans for a schedule of 60 National Hunt races next year that effectively exclude the top four jumps trainers as they will be restricted to trainers who’ve had less than 50 winners in either of the two previous seasons.
It remains the case though that if Goodwood has Group Ones sprinkled through its five days, Galway has enough middle-of-the-road contests to hold promise of the spotlight.
The potential pay-off from Galway’s success is underlined by how it is 30 years since Jessica Harrington first tasted significant success in the big Hurdle with Oh So Grumpy, a victory that kick-started a superb pioneering career both over jumps and on the flat.
There is also the fact that Ballybrit has hosted the early stages of top-flight equine careers. Tahiyra, a subsequent four-time Group One and classic winner, memorably won first time out here in 2022.
Galway officials will also hope to build on the momentum of last year’s much-needed resurgence in attendance figures.
An official total of 122,362 through the turnstiles was up over 5,600 on the previous year, arresting a slide from almost 150,000 less than a decade ago. The attendance record remains the near-217,000 that crammed into Ballybrit in 2006 at the height of Celtic Tiger extravagance.
Galway veterans realise the most important element to crowd figures is often the weather and the outlook for the early part of the week at least looks like being favourable.
Those same veterans also know how the track’s unique contours make the horses-four-courses theory notably valid around Ballybrit. Another factor is getting charges to peak for Galway at the end of July.
There will be plenty of interest then in Teed Up who goes for back-to-back victories in Monday’s €110,000 feature, the Connacht Hotel Handicap.
Widely regarded as the most coveted prize in the country for amateur riders, it has a maximum 20-runner field set to go at 7.10pm and is part of RTE’s coverage of the first four days. Terrestrial TV coverage switches to TG4 for the rest of the week.
Teed Up beat The Very Man by half a length in the big race a year ago, and ran twice more later in the week, finishing runner-up on the flat on the Friday before scoring over hurdles a couple of days later.
That brought his career tally around Ballybrit to five wins in all and Emmet Mullins’s runner will have leading amateur John Gleeson on his back this time.
Challenging for favouritism in ante-post betting has been Alphone Le Grande, the horse at the centre of how Tony Martin found himself with a two-month extension to his trainers’ licence suspension after winning at Newcastle last month.
Martin’s unabashed enjoyment of the success at Newcastle, in the middle of a three-month suspension for breaching doping rules, subsequently resulted in the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board slapping him with an extra two months.
It means Martin’s sister Cathy O’Leary continues to officially oversee his string and she will try to emulate Jessica Harrington who landed Monday’s big race with Modem in 2015.
Ultimately though, it would be no surprise if success went to Willie Mullins who is an unbackable favourite to be top trainer again.
He saddles four, including last year’s sixth, Lot Of Joy. She is back for another go off an 8lb lower handicap mark and on the back of an encouraging return to action at the Curragh on Derby day.
Topweight Metier represents British trainer Harry Fry and will be ridden by his sister-in-law, Áine O’Connor.
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