Willie Mullins’ Melbourne Cup Dream: Is Ethical Diamond the Answer?

After Royal Ascot success, Willie Mullins’ Ethical Diamond could target the Melbourne Cup in November. Photo via https://x.com/RacingPost/status/1936072779075584041

If Willie Mullins decided to retire tomorrow, it would be certain that his career obituary would state he exited at the top of his game, perhaps more dominant than ever. That’s not going to happen, of course. Mullins’s relentless will to win never seems to lessen. That said, in the summer, he does take his foot off the gas a bit, popping up here and there in select races in places like Ascot and Galway.

As the British and Irish flat racing season heats up across the summer, speculation often turns to the one prize that has eluded Mullins among the races he wants to win – the Melbourne Cup. He’s been close before and had favourites before, but he has yet to get his hands on Australia’s most iconic racing prize. It must be a strange feeling for a man accustomed to success.

Ethical Diamond is generating buzz.

The current speculation centres around Ethical Diamond, a worthy winner at Royal Ascot last month. The 5yo has been switched from hurdles to the flat and seems best suited to the latter. His win in the Duke of Edinburgh Stakes at Royal Ascot was impressive under Ryan Moore. Not everything in the race should act like a marker for Melbourne Cup success, but several elements do. Bookmakers took notice and gave him an interesting price of 20/1 for the 2025 Melbourne Cup.

You can take the odds with a pinch of salt this summer. Horse racing sportsbooks often don’t have the complete picture at this juncture, and the Melbourne Cup tends to follow a blueprint not unlike the Kentucky Derby in the sense of prep races, qualifiers, and declarations. In short, the race card could – and will – look very different when November rolls around.

Vauban disappointed when it mattered.

That said, just like Vauban in the last two runnings of the Melbourne Cup, if Mullins says he’s taking Ethical Diamond Down Under and believes he has a chance, bookies and punters will take it very seriously. The problem is that the Closutton trainer will hope for a better performance than what he got from Vauban last year and in 2023. Vauban was favourite for the 2023 Melbourne Cup and second-favourite for the 2024 edition, finishing 14^th and 11^th respectively.

To be fair to Vauban and Mullins, the Melbourne Cup has been brutal for favourites over the last decade. Incentivize (2021) and Tiger Moth (2020) finished 2^nd when tagged as favourites, but no favourite has won since Fiorente in 2013. We had 100/1 winners (Prince of Penzance) and 90/1 winners (Knight’s Choice – last year) at that time. So the race does throw up a bit of value for punters hunting a longshot.

Yet, past failures won’t bother Mullins too much. He’s had success in the race before with both highly-fancied horses and longshots, including Max Dynamite and Thomas Hobson. Max Dynamite was a narrow second behind Prince of Penzance in 2015, and both Max Dynamite and Thomas Hobson finished in the top 6 in 2017. Overall, Mullins has four top 5 finishes from 11 entries.

With each defeat and (relative) success, Mullins will learn more about one of the world’s significant racing challenges. Ethical Diamond may or may not be the answer, but you get the impression it’s a nut the Irish trainer will crack eventually. As we said, he’s relentless, and the best jumps trainer of the 21^st century wants the Melbourne Cup.