Patrick Mullins has one ride at Newbury today. If it wins that will be the 18th British jumps track at which he has ridden a winner.

There’s 42 National Hunt courses in total in the UK and Patrick is trying to get the full set. Even though he is 36 years of age, you wouldn’t like to bet against him doing it.

Over the past 20 years Mr P.W. Mullins has done quite a lot of things that haven’t been done before. He holds the record for number of winners ridden (74) in a single season by an amateur rider. He's been champion amateur rider 17 times and recently rode his 900th winner. Ted Walsh was the previous record holder, with 11 titles and 545 winners.

Ted and Patrick have something else in common – they were both part of separate father-son combinations to win the Grand National at Aintree, and so it was fitting that Ted was asked to present Patrick with the National Hunt Achievement Award at the Horse Racing Ireland Awards in Dublin last week.

“There Is a proverb in racing,” said Ted. “An ounce of breeding is worth a ton of feeding. This fellow is bred in the purple. His mother was a fine event rider, an international event rider. His father was a top amateur, if only in the ha’penny place to what he is doing as a trainer.

“Patrick's a credit to our sport. He's a credit to his parents. I'm sure they're delighted with everything he's done. He's a gentleman on or off the horse. He's as tough as nails. He looks a big easy-going fella. He's anything but. He'd hang you like that!”

If Patrick has a ruthless streak I dare say most of us have never seen it. Apart from that brief heated exchange with his cousin Danny at Limerick two years ago, I have never heard any stories of him losing his cool.

In fact shortly after the Limerick incident I published a story which wrongly attributed comments to Patrick relating to the matter. He called me on the Saturday morning and very politely pointed out my error. All I could do was apologise and correct it online straight away. I think he called me “a gentleman” and he never mentioned it again.

Looking back now, that Aintree win by Nick Rockett was arguably the best racing story of the year in this part of the world. It’s not just that an amateur rider won the race on a 33/1 shot trained by his father. There was a big, big backstory here. It was almost as if Patrick’s entire life was leading up to that moment.

In a pre-recorded video shown at the HRI Awards, Jackie Mullins said of her son: “From the time he was a kid, maybe six or seven or eight, he read books on the Grand National. He went [to Aintree] with his dad when he was about seven or eight. He was very taken with that course walk with his father.”

We saw photographs taken on that day, sometime in the mid 1990s, of the little boy paying his respects at Red Rum’s grave. Then we jumped forward to 2005 and saw footage of a teary-eyed 15-year-old running on to the track to meet Ruby Walsh on Hedgehunter, the yard’s first Grand National winner.

Patrick had broken through security to get on to the track. A school friend recalled how, at 6am that morning, Patrick had to be lowered out of a window at boarding school in Kildare, breaking curfew so he could travel to Aintree.

Now 20 years later here he was, winning the damn thing himself, against professionals, 24 hours after winning the Grade 1 Aintree Bowl on Gaelic Warrior.

Don’t tell me he had it easy or that anyone could have done all those things if they had the same chances. It has taken a huge amount of hard work, patience, ambition, skill, judgement on and off the track, and – perhaps most of all – dedication.

“Look at the size of him,” Ruby Walsh said at the HRI Awards. “To do the weights that he does shows the dedication that he has. And he loves it. It’s incredible that he has ridden almost 1,000 winners, and he’s done it on all sorts of horses. From summer fillies in Tramore to Grand Nationals.

“I suppose I admired him many years ago when he made smithereens of his collarbone, and he rode about five or six days later. That was the day I knew he was a real jockey.”

Danny Mullins, Brian Hayes and Rachael Blackmore also remarked on Patrick’s talents before the man himself was asked by MC Jane Mangan to reflect on that Grand National win and what it meant to him.

“Sure look,” says he. “I grew up looking at pictures of Red Rum and Crisp, and reading about Caughoo and Golden Miller, and watching grainy footage of Foinavon and Devon Loch.

“I saw Ted and Ruby win it and I remember running out on the track after Hedgehunter won to meet Ruby … so to be the person on the horse?. It's rare that reality is better than the dream.”

Great line. I suppose he’ll put that in a book one day. And he won’t need a ghost writer either.

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