How have odds-on favourites fared in the 2000 Guineas?
With City of Troy set to start a short price in the 2000 Guineas, John Ingles looks at the fate of other hot favourites in the colts' classic at Newmarket.
City of Troy – winner of Timeform’s Leading 2-y-o Award last season – is no bigger than 4/6 to make a winning reappearance in Saturday’s 2000 Guineas and if successful he would join Frankel as one of only two odds-on winners of the first colts’ classic in the last 30 years.
Frankel, who had landed odds of 1/4 in the Greenham Stakes at Newbury in his prep race, was sent off the 1/2 favourite for the 2000 Guineas in 2011 against a dozen rivals. Of those opponents, only Roderic O’Connor, who’d been runner-up to Frankel in the Dewhurst before winning the Criterium International, and the unbeaten National Stakes winner Pathfork, started at shorter than 10/1. It was no surprise, therefore, that Frankel maintained his unbeaten record but what couldn’t have been predicted was the unforgettable manner in which he would do so, quickly establishing a lead of at least ten lengths by halfway and having six lengths to spare at the line, a margin second only to the brilliant 1947 winner Tudor Minstrel who won by eight as the 11/8 favourite. That, of course, was to be just the first of a series of outstanding performances which Frankel was to put up at three and four.
The Dewhurst had been the last of Frankel’s four races as a two-year-old when his rating of 133p made him Timeform’s highest-rated two-year-old since the 1997 Dewhurst winner Xaar who will be mentioned again later. But his best performance that year had come not in the Dewhurst but in his previous race when he’d given the first indication at pattern level that he might be something well out of the ordinary when winning the Royal Lodge Stakes, still run at Ascot at the time, by ten lengths.
Before Frankel, the previous odds-on winner of the 2000 Guineas was the Andre Fabre-trained Zafonic in 1993, he too carrying the colours of Khalid Abdullah. Despite a shock defeat on soft ground at the hands of Kingmambo in the Prix Djebel beforehand, Zafonic was sent off the 5/6 favourite at Newmarket and under much firmer conditions which contributed to the track record being broken, he ran out the impressive winner by three and a half lengths from Barathea who himself landed the odds in the Irish 2000 Guineas on his next start. Like Frankel and City of Troy, Zafonic had been the previous season’s champion two-year-old and completed an unbeaten juvenile campaign in the Dewhurst, winning that race by four lengths.
Sir Michael Stoute trained the two odds-on 2000 Guineas winners of the 1980s, Shadeed (1985) and Doyoun (1988), both of whom landed odds of 4/5 after advertising their chances by winning the Craven Stakes shortly beforehand, rather than running to a high level as two-year-olds. They were the first odds-on winners of the 2000 Guineas since Nijinsky initiated his Triple Crown in 1970 with a 4/7 success at Newmarket.
But there have been plenty of disappointing odds-on shots in the 2000 Guineas too, none more so perhaps than Apalachee who started at 4/9 to give Vincent O’Brien and Lester Piggott another win four years after Nijinsky. City of Troy’s connections will therefore be hoping that he doesn’t suffer the same fate as that Ballydoyle-trained colt exactly 50 years ago. Apalachee’s third place behind Nonoalco at Newmarket was the first defeat of his career and he never raced again, having ended his two-year-old campaign by winning the Observer Gold Cup (now the Futurity Trophy) at Doncaster and returned with a win in the Gladness Stakes at the Curragh. Frankel was the shortest-priced favourite since Apalachee.
Two more colts who had been champions at two were turned over at odds on in the 2000 Guineas two decades later. The Observer Gold Cup had become the Racing Post Trophy by the time Celtic Swing won it in spectacular fashion by 12 lengths on soft ground in 1994. Like Frankel, he successfully prepped for the Guineas in the Greenham but under firmer conditions he was no match for the superior turn of foot of the previous season’s Dewhurst winner Pennekamp and went down by a head at odds of 4/5.
Pennekamp was Fabre’s second 2000 Guineas winner in three years after Zafonic and the Frenchman looked to have first-rate chances again with Zafonic’s son Xaar in 1998. He was sent off the 10/11 favourite after winning four of his five starts at two, notably the Dewhurst in which he put up a top-drawer performance that eclipsed even his own sire’s victory, winning by seven lengths, while a successful prep in the Craven confirmed him the one to beat in the Guineas. However, in a big field, Xaar could finish only a lacklustre fourth to the second favourite King of Kings who would prove to be the first of a record number of English classic winners for his trainer Aidan O’Brien and the first of his ten colts to date – also a record – to win the 2000 Guineas.
Among O’Brien’s ten 2000 Guineas winners, only four have been sent off favourite and none of those at odds on; George Washington at 6/4 in 2006, Camelot at 15/8 in 2012, Gleneagles at 4/1 in 2015 and Churchill at 6/4 in 2017.
On the other hand, O’Brien has also saddled ten beaten favourites in the 2000 Guineas, most recently Auguste Rodin who trailed home at odds of 13/8 last year. He would have to rank as one of his stable’s biggest disappointments at Newmarket – though of course he atoned at Epsom next time – along with another Racing Post/Futurity Trophy winner St Nicholas Abbey who was an even-money flop in 2010 on what proved his only outing at three, though he too restored his reputation later over longer distances.
Ballydoyle’s biggest let-down in the 2000 Guineas, though, was surely Air Force Blue, sent off the 4/5 favourite in 2016 after becoming another colt to stamp himself as the best of his generation at two with an impressive victory in the Dewhurst. That earned Air Force Blue a Timeform rating of 128p, and while he wasn’t unbeaten – he’d finished second in the Coventry Stakes – he had won all his other starts at two, including another clear-cut success in the National Stakes. With Guineas-standard form already in the book and a physique that suggested he’d train on well at three, as well as claims from his trainer that he was ‘the best two-year-old we’ve ever had’, Air Force Blue not only failed by a long chalk to deliver in the 2000 Guineas (beating one home in a race won by Galileo Gold) but also in three other subsequent starts.
Air Force Blue isn’t the only odds-on shot to have been beaten in the 2000 Guineas since Frankel. Godolphin’s Pinatubo was the 5/6 favourite in 2020 after an unbeaten six-race campaign at two which had concluded with wins in the National Stakes (by nine lengths) and the Dewhurst, earning him a top-class rating of 134p. However, he didn’t look to have a great deal of scope to improve physically at three and while he didn’t run badly in the Guineas – finishing just over a length third to Kameko – or his other starts that season, he did find that other members of his generation had caught up and overtaken him. The same connections had another short-priced National/Dewhurst winner beaten in the Guineas two years later when 5/4-shot Native Trail lost his unbeaten record against stablemate Coroebus.
On paper, City of Troy’s 2000 Guineas claims look as solid as any of the colts who have been sent off at short odds for the classic this century. He’s another champion two-year-old and unbeaten Dewhurst winner and will be bidding to become a second consecutive Dewhurst winner to take the 2000 Guineas as well after Chaldean last year.
The traditional 2000 Guineas trials didn’t throw up any significant new challengers and, if anything, the result of the Craven franked his Dewhurst form with two of his victims from last October, Haatem and Eben Shaddad, taking the first two places. A good sort physically who is bound to stay the extra furlong of the Guineas and almost certainly further still in due course, City of Troy has also had just the three races which gives him more scope than most champions at two for further progress. In other words, Frankel may not stand alone as the only odds-on 2000 Guineas winner this century by Saturday evening, though from Apalachee to Pinatubo there have been odds-on shots turned over to suggest that a victory from City of Troy can by no means be taken for granted.
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