Rory King looks back on a dramatic Yorkshire Oaks which saw Colin Keane get Kalpana home in front but not in the style the jockey might have wanted.
Pacemaking is an art, a skill even, it can take plenty of practice to master and it doesn’t simply depend on one horse, either. It is as much about the jockey on the horse sitting second in the race and what they want to do as it is about how fast the pacemaker goes.
If the jockey in second chooses to ignore the pacemaker then the race takes on a very different shape and the effects of the pacemaker are largely reduced – unless there is a clear plan. In a race that took on a similar look to last year’s Juddmonte International at this meeting in which Birr Castle was soon left to build up a big lead (seemingly not the plan), the Yorkshire Oaks was close to being a Ballydoyle tactical masterplan.
With Ronan Whelan rowing away on Sugar Island turning for home – already well clear at that point – Ryan Moore continued to sit and wait at the back of the field on Minnie Hauk, even tucking in slightly passing the 4f marker, clearly expecting and waiting for Colin Keane on Kalpana to get jittery with the distance the rest of the runners were still adrift of the pacemaker and to make his move prematurely.
That’s exactly what happened – quite understandably – and, had she been at her best, Minnie Hauk would have profited but she’s run her race just once this year, and the evidence is mounting that she’s not as good in 2026 as she looked when going down by just a head in last year’s Arc.
READ: Report, reaction and free video replay of Kalpana's Yorkshire Oaks win
It was another Irish-trained filly – though not the one obvious one – who benefited most from the way things played out and who very nearly scooped the jackpot. Sparan Nua was 16lb behind Kalpana on adjusted pre-race Timeform ratings and went off an unconsidered 25/1 shot, and while she plainly improved on her pre-race rating of 110, the run of the race reduced that margin to virtually nothing.
Kalpana went very nearly a whole second quicker than Sparan Nua between 4f out and 2f out and that left her vulnerable once the pacemaker was reeled in, Sparan Nua coming home more than 0.6 secs quicker for the last 2 furlongs.
Indeed, had the Irish filly not run into trouble and lost momentum under 3f out she may well have got up. That’s not to say things are as simple as trying to figure out how many lengths Sparan Nua lost in that incident and adding that to the bare form she ran to as getting tangled up at that juncture, just as Kalpana was running her hardest at a point of the race earlier than ideal to be doing so, is a big part of what allowed Sparan Nua to get so close come the line, Kalpana clocking nearly 13 secs for the penultimate furlong and approaching 14 secs for the final one.
My suspicion is that without the trouble Sparan Nua would have won on the day but more important is to try to establish quite how much Kalpana was inconvenienced by running her race so inefficiently in the straight. A final time more than a second slower than the following Galtres Stakes adds weight to the idea that the answer is “quite a lot” – somewhere in the region of 6-8lb below the figure she’d run to in winning the King George on early calculations.
It’s not just pacemaking that’s an art, handicapping is, too!
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