Irish Gold Cup set to stay in Saturday slot at Dublin Racing Festival despite Willie Mullins suggesting a return to Sunday

The Irish Gold Cup is set to stay in its new Saturday slot said Leopardstown chief Tim Husbands, responding to a suggestion from Willie Mullins that it could return to a Sunday.

Leopardstown played host to rapturous scenes as the Mullins-trained Galopin Des Champs was walked back into the winners' enclosure after landing a third Irish Gold Cup on Saturday and Husbands believes day one of the Dublin Racing Festival is most suited to hosting the feature race of the weekend as it traditionally has the larger crowd.

He said: "Day one will live long in the memory. Galopin Des Champs's entry into the parade ring would put goosebumps on the back of your neck and hopefully he'll be well enough to come back next year. The volume of noise was huge, it was a fantastic reception for a fantastic horse and it illustrated just how popular he is.

"The core reasons we put the Irish Gold Cup on day one was to give the chasers the best crowd possible and we think the race deserves it.

"We have a tight site but we had additional food facilities, toilets and a much larger marquee. We didn't experience any queues and the feedback has been very positive."

Tim Husbands: chief executive of LeopardstownCredit: Patrick McCann

The track had a total of 34,400 through the turnstiles across the two days, with 18,297 attending on Saturday and 16,103 on Sunday. The crowd on day one dropped by 1,720 from 2024 but that was forecast due to the track establishing a ceiling on attendees, while day two was up by 100 on last year.

The meeting was made ticket-only this year and Husbands felt Saturday's crowd hit the sweet spot.

He said: "We set the capacity at 18,500 and we were just short of that on Saturday. Obviously the rugby match [Ireland v England] taking place affected that extra couple of hundred we wanted but we have great optimism after the weekend that the capacity will be reached on both days. There's plenty of encouragement in there and you can't underestimate the impact of 50,000 people at the Aviva was likely to have, so I think our numbers held up really well.

"I think ticket-only is here to stay. There was only about a hundred people who turned up on Saturday on day one and three hundred on day two. Compared to last year when there was a couple of thousand on both days, so I think the message got through. It might take a couple of years for that to bed in but it certainly allowed us to plan our resources effectively."

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