He will be 9, rising 10 by the time he comes back (if he comes back). It is difficult to envisage him winning anything significant now.
I suppose he has to be considered a disappointment. He looked to have the world at his feet two years ago but maybe that race wasn’t as strong as it looked at the time.
Mullins started him off over the wrong distance as a chaser and he was emphatically put in his place by the late Sir Gino. He looked good again when winning at Leopardstown but his performance in the Brown Advisory was dreadful.
I still think he should have won the Stayers Hurdle and it wasn’t Townend’s finest hour. However, I wonder if Ballyburn had become one of those horses who makes his own bad luck? He looked like a difficult ride with that ridiculously low head carriage.
It seemed to me that Mullins saw the horse as the heir to Galopin Des Champs but it didn’t turn out that way.