lncrease in short-priced Cheltenham winners shows the impact of Willie Mullins

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In Monday's email Chris reflects on the dominance of Willie Mullins at last week's Cheltenham Festival – and subscribers can get more great insight, tips and racing chat from Chris every Monday to Friday.

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Last week's Cheltenham Festival was hugely enjoyable but my concerns about levels of competition there were nonetheless reinforced. Winning ten of the 28 races was a tremendous personal achievement by Willie Mullins, especially as six of those wins came in Grade 1 races, but it does also underline the point that a small number of trainers have completely taken over the game.

For context, ten festival winners is more than David Elsworth trained in his whole career. Until quite recently, it was unheard of for a trainer to have half as many in a single year.

It was 2009 when Paul Nicholls became the first trainer to have five winners at a festival and he was still the only one to do it until 2012, just ten years ago. Nicky Henderson had seven winners that year, Mullins was the first to eight in 2015 and now here we are.

Surely we can all see the way this is going? The day will come when someone gets a dozen winners, then the next landmark will be half of all races at a single festival falling to a single trainer.

It takes a tremendous amount of hard work and skill just to get a squad of 60-odd to the festival, never mind producing them in sufficiently good shape to win some of the best races of the year. But evidently it is harder still for Mullins' rivals to compete against him.

Mullins has made races more predictable. Of his ten winners, only one was returned at bigger than 5-2. The exception was The Nice Guy, unbeaten but seen as the yard's second-string for the Albert Bartlett and allowed to start at 18-1 for his first race in Graded company.

In total, 16 of the 28 festival winners were returned at 3-1 or shorter. It may seem normal to you for big-race winners to be well fancied but depth of competition at the festival used to ensure that such prices were a rarity.

Elimay was Willie Mullins' tenth and final winner of the week at CheltenhamCredit: Patrick McCann (racingpost.com/photos)

At the 2012 festival, just five of the 27 winners were 3-1 or shorter. In 2002, when the meeting was only three days long, it was four winners out of 20. All the way back in 1992, just two winners were that short.

As a punter, I'm trying to change my thinking to adapt to the new festival, since the game is now largely about discerning which shortie is trustworthy and which is a trapdoor. But as someone who cares about the game and wants it to thrive long after I'm gone, I'm deeply troubled by its direction of travel. For all that the Turners became one of the dramatic high-points of the week, had one of its two star horses stepped on a stone or run a temperature or refused its feed at the wrong moment and become a non-runner, it would have been a procession.

Mullins fielded a team of 63 last week, while Gordon Elliott ran 60. Together, they accounted for 30 per cent of all runners at this year's festival, and 43 per cent of the winners.

That is not to say that Mullins had a stress-free time of it. His form figures for the week were 34F36U4745920113634501UU13400003F12553589001451900F126P67P11500.

There are a couple of winner-free stretches in there that can't have been too enjoyable, especially the 13 losers on day one, when Stattler provided some late consolation in the National Hunt Chase. Dysart Dynamo fell, Appreciate It was unplaced, Stormy Ireland was unplaced and even the mighty Gaelic Warrior got turned over. If you live through a run like that, the game seems anything but easy.

Surprisingly, Gordon Elliott was having a much tougher time. His form figures were P50603200007P22FPPPP081621282B00000FPP7P084320000PP437000873, with Commander Of Fleet and Delta Work saving face.

Everything had seemed set up for him to have a big week but it didn't happen and quite a few of his horses ran disappointingly. While Mullins had ten winners and just two pulled up, Elliott had two winners and 11 pulled up.

The Front Runner has written about the increasing phenomenon of odds-on shots at the festival. In the end, we had five last week, in line with the rolling three-year average but slightly fewer than the last two years.

Three of the five won, again in line with the experience of previous years. There's always something that goes wrong to save the bookies and deny anyone who strings the hottest favourites together in an acca. This time it was sulky Shishkin and Galopin Des Champs leaving his hind legs in the last.

Honeysuckle leads them home in the Champion HurdleCredit: Mike Hewitt (Getty Images)

Another regular theme in this space has been the mares' allowance. I feel it should be removed in a small number of the very best races, so we can be sure that we're identifying the true champions.

There were two mares in Tuesday's Champion Hurdle, both getting half a stone from their rivals despite both being previous winners of the race, and guess what, they finished first and second. Four of the last seven Champion Hurdles have now been won by mares, as well as seven of the last 11 Arcs and five of the last ten King Georges.

Do we really need to be giving females an advantage in these races? I can't see why. I find it irritating, looking at the Champion Hurdle result and thinking that the third home has put up the best performance.

"I'm not sure you all appreciate her as much as you possibly should," Henry de Bromhead said of Honeysuckle on Racing TV. But every time she runs against males, she's given a significant advantage. Get Rachael Blackmore to put up half a stone overweight the next time and then we'll see what Honeysuckle is made of.

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The Front Runner is our latest email newsletter available exclusively to Members' Club Ultimate subscribers. Chris Cook, a four-time Racing Reporter of the Year award winner, provides his take on the day's biggest stories and tips for the upcoming racing every morning from Monday to Friday