Donn McClean puts the spotlight on Joseph O'Brien

Horse Racing

Sun July 05, 2026 · 3h ago

There’s something about the June bank holiday for the O’Brien family.

It was on the first Monday in June 1993 that Aidan O’Brien had his first winner as a licensed trainer: Wandering Thoughts in a seven-furlong handicap at Tralee. And it was on the first Monday in June 2016 that Joseph O’Brien sent out his first winner. And his second and his third and his fourth. A double at the flat meeting that day at Gowran Park, both ridden by his brother Donnacha, was augmented by another double at the National Hunt meeting at Listowel, the bumper winner ridden by his sister Sarah, in a double-page spread that made headline news.

Joseph had been busy, mind you, during the 23 years that flowed between 1993 and 2016. He used the time to celebrate his first birthday, start school, win bronze at the European Pony Championships in Belgium, sit his Leaving Cert and win the Derby. And win the Derby again.

The fact that he stretched to 5ft 11in and change told you that his career as a jockey would have a finiteness to it, mind you. Nature dictates. So he decided that he would pack it all into a short space of time. He started quickly, he rode his first winner a week after he turned 16.

He shared the apprentices’ championship with Ben Curtis and Gary Carroll in his first season as a jockey, for part of which he was still in school, and he won it outright in his second. He won his first Classic that year too, he partnered Roderic O’Connor to victory in the Irish 2000 Guineas, and he won the Moyglare Stud Stakes on Maybe and he won the Racing Post Trophy on Camelot. Then, at the end of the 2011 season, he won the Breeders’ Cup Turf at Churchill Downs on St Nicholas Abbey, thereby becoming the youngest ever jockey to win a Breeders’ Cup race.

St Nicholas Abbey puts them to the sword

He won the Guineas and the Derby on Camelot the following season, and he won the Prince of Wales’s Stakes on So You Think and he won the QE2 on Excelebration. He was champion jockey in Ireland too in 2012, and he was champion jockey again in 2013, when he rode 126 winners, more winners than any jockey had ever ridden before in an Irish flat season. He rode 31 Group or Grade 1 winners in total in five different jurisdictions and on three different continents before he succumbed to the inevitable, bowed to nature and hung up his riding boots.

All the while though, his training career was bubbling away underneath. Aidan O’Brien is down as the trainer of the 2016 Triumph Hurdle winner Ivanovich Gorbatov, but the world knows that JP McManus’ horse’s victory was achieved essentially under the direction of Joseph.

We didn’t know then what was to follow.

It was difficult to know which direction he would go, flat or National Hunt, because he couldn't do both. There was no way that he would be able to compete at the top level under both codes.

But the evidence suggested otherwise. He bagged his first Group 1 race on the flat in September 2016, less than four months after he had taken out his trainer’s licence, when his brother Donnacha drove Intricately to victory in the Moyglare Stud Stakes. Less than three months after that he landed the Grade 3 juveniles’ hurdle at the Fairyhouse Hatton’s Grace Hurdle meeting with Landofhopeandglory.

The National Hunt season rolled on. He won the Opera Hat Chase with Slowmotion and he won the Nas Na Riogh Chase with Edwulf. Then the 2017 flat season kicked in and he won the Ballysax Stakes with Rekindling.

It oscillated like that. National Hunt to flat and back to National Hunt again. He won the John & Chich Fowler Chase with Slowmotion and he won the Rochestown Stakes with True Blue Moon and the Curragh Cup with Rekindling, and four days later, he won the Galway Hurdle with Tigris River.

At the end of the 2017 flat season, he sent Rekindling to the far side of the world and won the Melbourne Cup with the three-year-old Rekindling. He was 24. The youngest trainer ever to win the Melbourne Cup.

Rekindling (near) edges out Johannes Vermeer and Max Dynamite

The milestones kept coming. In February 2018, just three months after he had won the Melbourne Cup, he bagged his first Grade 1 National Hunt win when Tower Bridge won the Nathaniel Lacy Hurdle at Leopardstown’s Dublin Racing Festival and, the following day, he bagged his second when Edwulf won the Irish Gold Cup.

Five months later, he sent out Latrobe to win the Irish Derby, just four years after he had won the race as a jockey on Australia, and ridden by his brother Donnacha, on a day that he still numbers among the best of his career.

He pushed the bar higher too. He sent out Iridessa to win the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf at Santa Anita in 2019, thereby becoming just the second person in the history of the Breeders’ Cup after Freddy Head to ride and to train a Breeders’ Cup winner.

He won his first British Classic as a trainer when Galileo Chrome won the St Leger in September 2020 and, seven weeks later, he won the Melbourne Cup for the second time with Twilight Payment. Less than a year later, he went back to Australia and won the Cox Plate with State Of Rest, who had won the Saratoga Derby in America two and a half months earlier, and who would win the Prix Ganay in France six months later and the Prince of Wales’s Stakes in England six weeks after that. Four Group/Grade 1 races in four different countries and on three different continents in the space of less than a year.

Tom Marquand celebrates Galileo Chrome's win in the Pertemps St Leger

The National Hunt side kept pace. He recorded his first Cheltenham Festival winner when Band Of Outlaws won the Fred Winter Hurdle in 2019, and he recorded his second when he landed the Martin Pipe Hurdle two days later with Early Doors, who went on to win the Galway Plate over a year later.

His National Hunt team has become more streamlined in recent years, but even so, he won five Grade 1 races last season. He landed the Stayers’ Hurdle at Cheltenham with the 11-year-old Home By The Lee, who went on to win the Liverpool Hurdle at Aintree. He won the Sefton Hurdle at Aintree too with exciting young staying hurdler Zeus Power, and he won Grade 1 races at the Christmas Festival and at the Dublin Racing Festival with Solness and Talk The Talk respectively. He would have won another King George too with Banbridge had the bob of a head gone the other way, and he was arguably unlucky too not to win the Grand National with Jordans.

Of course, it helps when you are the son of Aidan O’Brien, but that’s not it. Not now. Not this far into his career. You stand or fall on your results, and you can’t argue with Joseph O’Brien’s results. He has assembled a top-class team of horses and a top-class team of people. He goes from strength to strength.

And on the flat, he has stepped up another level. He won the Salsabil Stakes at Navan in April with Thundering On, a daughter of his 2021 Pretty Polly Stakes winner Thundering Nights, and she went on to Epsom and ran out a seriously impressive winner of the Oaks. And he won the Cashel Palace Hotel Derby Trial with James J Braddock, who put up a big performance to finish third in the Derby.

Royal Ascot 2026 was a showcase week. Joseph O’Brien was responsible for five of the 35 winners on one of the most important weeks on the global racing calendar, and those victories spanned the spectrum, from the Windsor Castle Stakes over six furlongs with the two-year-old colt King Of Cloughan, to the Ascot Stakes over two and a half miles with the four-year-old gelding Kizlyar, and just about everything in between. Limestone and Enceladus and Green Carrera. Five different jockeys and five different owners. And the week after Royal Ascot, he won the Group 3 Blue Wind Stakes with Rebel Moon.

There’s a metronomic consistency to Joseph O’Brien's modus operandi. He has had more than 100 winners on the flat in Ireland every year but one since 2018, and that is remarkable in a country in which Aidan O’Brien is the only other trainer who reaches that number these days. And there are the big days, the big races, the marquee wins.

More to follow.

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