Fallen Angel pictured with winning connections

Auguste Rodin, Fallen Angel and what to expect from City Of Troy

By Graham Cunningham

17:08 · THU May 30, 2024

Graham Cunningham was our man at the Curragh on Irish 1,000 Guineas and Tattersalls Gold Cup day - he reacts to what he witnessed.

The hits, and the consequent explanations that a cynic might construe as excuses, just keep on coming.

But any suggestion that Auguste Rodin is “totally unique” is surely gone for good after last year’s Derby hero was floored by old rival White Birch in a rain-lashed Tattersalls Gold Cup.

Aidan O’Brien arrived at the Curragh having won the TGC 10 times, including two apiece from the mighty So You Think and the globetrotting Magical.

And yet the quest for an 11th felt very different for the simple reason that the colt in the spotlight had spent the last year winning four of the world’s greatest turf races and blowing out completely in three others.

Auguste Rodin has to settle for second behind White Birch

That sort of ale or jail profile is extremely rare at the top level, so small wonder the Ballydoyle team had their game faces on before a race worth 295,000 Euro to the winner, and a whole lot more in reputational value depending on the outcome.

Aidan shelved the excuse book and earlier talk of a tepid pace making March’s Sheema Classic eclipse a non-event, contenting himself with telling the Racing Post that last year’s double Derby, Irish Champion and Breeders’ Cup Turf hero had “come forward nicely” since his trip to Dubai.

A pre-race chat with RTE’s Brian Gleeson was conducted in similarly cautious manner and the reason for the realism became abundantly clear as White Birch and Colin Keane bounded three lengths clear to avenge his 2023 Derby defeats behind the runner-up.

Auguste Rodin pulled eight clear of the rest and was far from disgraced in defeat, with O'Brien suggesting that heavy rain and a “speed wobble” coming down the hill into the straight had been contributory factors.

But the mercurial Deep Impact colt can now be backed at 7/1 for the Prince of Wales’s Stakes and the idea that White Birch has made greater progress since their last meeting at the Curragh in July is surely worth serious consideration.

Fallen Angel’s speed wobble came at Newmarket rather than the Curragh but Karl Burke's filly banished memories of her plain run in the first fillies’ Classic of the year with an emphatic success in the Tattersalls Irish 1,000 Guineas.

Last year’s impressive Moyglare winner proved that she’s thrived from two to three under a dashing Danny Tudhope ride and, hard on the heels of White Birch’s G1 success for the Murphy clan of Cork, it provided a welcome reminder that elite Flat races can and should be about much more than straight shootouts between Coolmore and Godolphin.

Fallen Angel pictured with winning connections

But as hardcore Curragh regulars in a worryingly-thin crowd by Classic-day standards digested replays of the day’s big races it was hard not to cast forward to another potential game of Ballydoyle bounceback at Epsom next weekend.

Pundits who live their lives with splinters in their arses will spend next week telling us that City Of Troy can win the Betfred Derby if back to his best but the RP’s Tom Segal has jumped off the top bar of the fence by booming that “the pass he’s being given in so many quarters for his lamentable Guineas effort staggers me.”

That sort of punchy take is welcome and hard to argue with on one level - but then you remember that Aidan turned Auguste Rodin’s Guineas base metal into Derby gold just 12 short months ago. And then you recall that that the three Derby possibles who have excelled this spring – Economics, Arabian Crown and the ill-fated Hidden Law – will all be missing on Derby day.

Say what you will about Aidan’s lexicon of hard luck stories and tendency to blame himself when one of the stars gets turned over, but his assertion that “I’m not sure we ever sent a horse to the Derby with as much ability as City Of Troy” is the most compelling narrative of the 2024 Derby by a country mile.

And yet, for those of us who can’t get enough of Aidan’s memorable one-liners, that startling utterance only occupied the silver medal position on the quote podium from a media day on the Ballydoyle gallops two weeks ago.

Connoisseurs of the genre will need no reminding that the most dominant trainer of the modern era scolded himself for treating City Of Troy as “too much of a god” during that rain-soaked shindig.

Whether another moody weather forecast will hinder O’Brien’s bid for a record 10th Derby is a conversation well worth having.

And, if you’re of a cynical mindset, so is the question of whether we treat a certain softly-spoken handler as too much of a god when it comes to the purple prose he generates from time to time.

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