Our man in Ireland Donn McClean runs the rule over the Aidan O'Brien-trained duo Point Lonsdale and Luxembourg ahead of the 2000 Guineas.
Nobody has trained more 2000 Guineas winners than Aidan O’Brien. It is 24 years since he won the colts’ Classic for the first time with King Of Kings, and he has won it nine times since, including three times in the last five years and four times in the last seven.
Interestingly, Aidan O’Brien has fielded more than one runner in the 2000 Guineas in each of the last 10 renewals and, on four of those occasions, the most-fancied of his runners according to SPs has finished behind at least one of his stable companions. When Magna Grecia won the race in 2019, he had his better-fancied stable companion Ten Sovereigns behind him in fifth place.
You can understand why. These are three-year-old colts, highly talented adolescents, bursting with potential but limited in experience. Many of them haven’t raced in public since they were juveniles and, by definition, there is a limit to what can be gleaned from homework. It is difficult to be certain about a pecking order.
You can’t discount an Aidan O’Brien-trained Guineas representative just because it appears that there is a better-fancied stable companion in the race.
Which is why you shouldn’t discount Point Lonsdale. The Australia colt progressed last year as the season developed, winning his maiden by five and a half lengths at The Curragh in early June before going to Royal Ascot and winning the Chesham Stakes – a race that the trainer won in 2016 with subsequent dual Guineas winner Churchill – digging deep to get the better of subsequent Solario Stakes winner Reach For The Moon, the pair of them coming nicely clear of their rivals.
Point Lonsdale went on to easily land the odds in the Group 3 Tyros Stakes and in the Group 2 Futurity Stakes, both over seven furlongs, before going back to The Curragh in September and finishing second to Native Trail in the Group 1 National Stakes.
He was well beaten by Charlie Appleby’s colt in the end in the National Stakes, but there is a chance that we didn’t see the real Point Lonsdale that day. He just didn’t travel through his race with the swagger that he had shown in the Tyros Stakes and in the Futurity, and he didn’t go to the line with the same strength. Of course, he was taking on better opposition in the National Stakes, and it may have been simply down to that, but he only just got up to beat Ebro River for the runner-up spot at the end of the seventh furlong, which stretches Hugo Palmer’s horse’s stamina.
As well as that, Point Lonsdale has raced only over seven furlongs. He has raced five times, each time over the same trip. A full-brother to Broome, a Group 1 winner over a mile and a half and second in the Breeders’ Cup Turf, he should improve for the step up to a mile. The mount of Frankie Dettori on Saturday, he could be better over even further later in the season but, remember, his sire was only beaten three parts of a length in the Guineas before winning the Derby.
That said, you can understand why Luxembourg is the shorter price of the two Ballydoyle Guineas colts. The Camelot colt raced three times last season, and he won three times. Impressive in winning his maiden over a mile on his racecourse debut at Killarney in July, he stepped forward from that next time when he easily landed the Group 2 Beresford Stakes at The Curragh in late September.
He was sent off at odds-on for the Vertem Futurity Trophy on the back of his Beresford win, and he landed the odds fairly emphatically. The early pace wasn’t overly strong in the Futurity, which shouldn’t have been a positive for him, but he showed an impressive turn of foot on the far side when Ryan Moore asked him to pick up, hitting the front at the two-furlong marker and staying on nicely to win well.
It used to be the case that the Vertem Futurity Trophy was more a pointer to the following year’s Derby than the following year’s Guineas – a one-mile Group 1 race for juveniles run in October, at the end of the season, often on soft ground – but that has not been the case in recent times. Three of the previous four winners, Saxon Warrior, Magna Grecia and Kameko, won the Guineas, while the 2020 winner Mac Swiney won the Irish Guineas. And it is not insignificant that two of those three Newmarket Guineas winners were trained by Aidan O’Brien.
And Luxembourg’s sire Camelot also won the Vertem Futurity Trophy in 2011, as a prelude to going on and winning the Guineas and the Derby the following season, as well as the Irish Derby for good measure. It is obviously a big ask to expect that Luxembourg can emulate his sire in terms of achievement as a three-year-old, but he is a hugely exciting colt, unbeaten in three. Limited in experience but bursting with potential.
For more from Donn visit www.donnmcclean.com
