Lossiemouth caps dominant season with fourth straight Punchestown hurdle win

Lossiemouth turned one defeat into the footnote of the season. The seven-year-old grey mare trained by Willie Mullins for Rich and Susannah Ricci finished the campaign with four major wins, taking the Morgiana Hurdle, the December Hurdle, the Champion Hurdle and, at Punchestown on May 1, the Boodles Champion Hurdle. The only blemish on that run came in the Irish Champion Hurdle, and it only sharpened the sense that this was the horse setting the pace in the division, not merely collecting prizes.

Her Punchestown victory was the kind that confirmed a hierarchy. Sent off 7-5 favourite, Lossiemouth delivered a front-running, decisive performance to win the festival race for the fourth straight year, with Golden Ace, the 2025 Champion Hurdle winner, among those behind her. Mullins’ stable had been dealing with State Man’s absence for part of the campaign, and that opened the door for Lossiemouth to step forward as the yard’s leading two-mile hurdling option. She did exactly that, and with authority.

The season’s defining moment came earlier, at Cheltenham on March 10, when Lossiemouth landed the Champion Hurdle and became only the eighth mare ever to win the race. That victory also gave Mullins his sixth Champion Hurdle, a marker of the trainer’s grip on the top end of the sport and of how far Lossiemouth had climbed after earlier setbacks. She had been kept out of the 2025 Champion Hurdle in favor of the Mares’ Hurdle after a runner-up finish to Constitution Hill in the Christmas Hurdle and a heavy fall at Leopardstown, but the decision to move her into open company changed the shape of her career.

By the end of this season, there was little doubt about how the market and the racing public should view her. Lossiemouth had been described all spring as the top performer in hurdling, and the record backed it up. The one defeat at Leopardstown stood as the tension point in an otherwise dominant campaign, proof that the run was earned rather than automatic. In a division long defined by geldings, she spent the year forcing the conversation to go through her.