PATRICK MULLINS ON SHARING GRAND NATIONAL GLORY WITH DAD WILLIE

Patrick reaches back in time to narrate a story of the early furlongs of his life as a horseman.

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He is 18, has ridden two stinkers at Galway, and, on the way home, he slams his father’s car into a pothole.

What follows, though the former might be more immediately evident than the latter, is both a window into Willie’s competitive nature and, a father revealing his love without ever deploying that highly-charged four-letter word.

"Willie shouts ‘pull over, pull over. You gave two horses a bad ride, you are not going to destroy my car as well. Get out.

"And we swapped seats and he drove the rest of the way home.

"That was the Monday. On the Sunday I rode one in the Bumper that my mother owned and I missed the start. There was no sign of Willie after the race. I rang him after having a shower and said ‘where are you?. He said ‘I'm passed Athenry, your race was over after the start.

"So I had to go home with the horse driver - which would be fine but he was full up front, so I had to go the whole way home in with the horses in the back of the lorry.

A valuable lesson in life."

That Willie - Patrick almost always calls him Willie - harvest miracles as routinely as a farmer does his annual crop was evident again a week ago when Ethical Diamond landed the Breeders’ Cup Turf.

We probe his son for the father’s secret sauce, the condiment that sets Mullins senior apart from the rest of the field.

Patrick talks of the fertility of Willie’s imagination, his patience and personable nature, his eye, even as his 70th birthday approaches, for innovation. And of a man whose life would be silent without the music of battle.