The_Guardian_-_2016-12-29

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Horse racing
Jack Kennedy’s Outlander eases Michael
O’Leary’s anguish over Willie Mullins
• Kennedy lands win for O’Leary to break former trainer Mullins’ dominance
• Lexus Chase victory at Leopardstown is 100th winner for 17-year-old jockey
Jack Kennedy’s victory on Outlander in the Lexus Chase at Leopardstown was the jockey’s first win
in a Grade One race. Photograph: racingfotos.com/Rex/Shutterstock
Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, became a billionaire by cutting costs whenever he
could but for the first two and a half days of the Christmas meeting here he looked like a man who
knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Horse racing tips: Thursday 29 December
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Willie Mullins, the trainer O’Leary abandoned in the summer in a dispute over training fees, had won
11 of the 18 races to that point and so, as three of the horses O’Leary removed from the yard galloped
towards the last in the Grade One Lexus Chase on Wednesday, with the Mullins-trained favourite in
hot pursuit, he could be forgiven for fearing the worst.
“Having three days of seeing my colours finish down at the other end of the parade ring, any one of
them would have done fine,” O’Leary said afterwards, “but I thought coming to the last that they’d all
fall after the week we’re having here.”
Instead it was Outlander, a Grade One winner for Mullins at this track last February, who stayed on
strongly to win the meeting’s feature event for his new trainer, Gordon Elliott, with Don Poli, another
horse that made the same move, second. Mullins’ Djakadam, the 5-4 favourite, was third, with
Valseur Lido, who left Mullins to join Henry de Bromhead, back in fourth.