Yorkshire Oaks: Rory King with Timeform reaction

Aren’t things so much easier when they’re kept simple? In contrast to the totally unharmonised approach between pacemaker and leading contender in Wednesday's Juddmonte International, there was a real air of inevitability about Thursday's Yorkshire Oaks.

Aidan O’Brien – having thrown a rare curve ball in the King George last month – restored normality to big-race tactics with Garden of Eden ensuring an honest pace for Minnie Hauk. O’Brien stated in an interview after the International yesterday that his horses “usually like high-tempo races” and that is certainly the case with Minnie Hauk who looks much better with a good pace to chase, her strength through the last two furlongs particularly impressive.

I have to admit, it’s not just inmates of Ballydoyle who like “high-tempo races”, as handicappers have a definite preference for them, too. Unpicking races like the Sussex Stakes and the International might be where we really earn our corn, but there will always be a larger degree of uncertainty with arriving upon a figure for that sort of race (and in turn by how much to upgrade those disadvantaged by how things panned out) than with well-run races.

Take the Yorkshire Oaks for example. Minnie Hauk had a pre-race Timeform rating of 122 (in line with Whirl’s improvement post-Epsom where Minnie Hauk had beaten her when the clear stable number one) and Estrange a pre-race rating of 116. Hey presto, an honest gallop that allows those involved to show their true colours sees Minnie Hauk give Estrange a 3½-length beating which equates to a little over 6lb, exactly the difference between them that their pre-race ratings suggested. Long may truly-run races at the highest level reign!

Having written in a previous Takeaway about how well fillies and mares have fared in the Arc over the past couple of decades, it’s pleasing to see it’s still a trio of fillies who top the betting for the Paris showpiece in six weeks. The question now is whether Minnie Hauk can up her game a little further, and I think the answer is yes.

Kalpana might have the slightly higher rating after her King George second, but Minnie Hauk will retain a Timeform p. Estrange is a very good filly but it’s hard to think Minnie Hauk couldn’t have done even better today had there been something good enough to push her to those heights.

O’Brien has now won the Yorkshire Oaks nine times, all of them with three-year-olds, including some tip-top fillies, but only a couple of those previous 8 even ran in the Arc that year, with Snowfall’s sixth the best finish, though things might have been different had Peeping Fawn’s career not been forced to end prematurely shortly after and Love ruled out for the rest of the campaign, while his one filly to win the Arc, Found, had been second to her stablemate Seventh Heaven in the Yorkshire Oaks.

Ironically, given the record of fillies in the race and how good his two main ones have been this year, neither are in the Arc as things stand, the eight Ballydoyle horses entered all colts. Clearly at least one of them is likely to be supplemented but it’s a measure of the strides the two of them have made this summer that neither were put in the race when entries closed at an admittedly staggeringly-early middle of May.

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