Our man at the track Graham Cunningham reflects on Sunday's action at the Irish Champions Festival.
No Galileo, no problem as Aidan rolls into autumn
London was abuzz with flag waving patriots making a right old racket on Saturday – but enough about a Last Night of the Proms that culminated with a rousing 50th anniversary rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody.
Actually, let’s strike that.
The sight of a Royal Albert Hall filled with 6,000 Herberts chanting ‘Galileo, Galileo’ with gusto on Saturday night made me stop grumbling about the delay to Match of the Day and start thinking back to a vintage year when the greatest stallion of all time propelled the man who used to train him to a new world record.
Dual Guineas winners Churchill and Winter; Irish Derby and Leger hero Capri; Highland Reel dancing in at Epsom and Royal Ascot; autumn bloomers Hydrangea, Happily and Rhodendendron; Order of St George flying the flag in the Irish Leger; and ultimate road warrior Highland Reel beating BC Turf winner Talismanic in a memorable Hong Kong Vase.
I dare say there’s a special space in the Coolmore trophy chamber to honour a global 2017 campaign that saw Aidan O’Brien harness the phenomenal power of those Galileo stars to eclipse Bobby Frankel’s record of 25 G1 winners in a calendar year.
And although these are still very early days, the polishers might have to start thinking about a similar shrine to 2025 after another successful Irish Champions Festival.
Precision timing as Whelan strikes on Precise
There were no thunderbolts and lightning as the Kildare faithful made their way to the Curragh for day two of the ICF, but a ferocious wind blew in the faces of the sprinters who set the card in motion.
It didn’t feel like a Crowded House as ‘Always Take the Weather With You’ sounded around the famous whistling grandstand and Ronan Whelan produced one of the quotes of the day after PRECISE outstayed Beautify, Venetian Sun and Composing to give Aidan his eleventh Moyglare Stud Stakes win.
“Any time you get the leg over you know you have a chance,” said the 32-year-old Kildare native, while Aidan reflected on Delacroix’s Irish Champion Stakes success and said it’s “very possible” we will see him again this autumn.
And then it was Kia time in more ways than one.
ARIZONA BLAZE and Bucanero Fuerte gave the jolly Joorabchian a 1-3 in the Bar One Racing Flying Five and the impressive David Egan beamed as he said: “I had to go with my gut feeling.”
The Amo Racing supremo was charm itself in conversation with RTV’s Kevin O’Ryan after the race but his pre-race comments about what went wrong in a chequered relationship with the man he calls ‘Raith’ Beckett were on the pointed side of spiky.
That man Raith rerouted AMILOC to the Irish St Leger because the English version bars geldings (either accidental or otherwise) and his unbeaten three-year-old ran a belter in defeat despite being swamped late by Melbourne Cup bound AL RIFFA.
Beckett is toying with a tilt at the Breeders’ Cup Turf for Amiloc, while the remarkable Eve Johnson Houghton will spend the next few days in dreamland after ZAVATERI’s never-say-die defeat of Gstaad in the Vincent O’Brien National Stakes.
“I’m just so lucky” was the repeated EJH mantra as she waited for the commissars to rule on a brush between the first two that took place in the shadow of the post.
But you need a lot more than luck to snag a National Stakes winner for 35,000 guineas and it would have been a grievous injustice had the expulsion tool been brandished.
Eighteen down, ten to go as Aidan prepares to go global
Gstaad’s agonising defeat, followed by a rare lifeless effort from Illinois in the Leger, took a little gloss off what has been another successful ICF for Aidan and dem boys.
But the scores on the G1 doors compared to the corresponding weekend eight years ago tell an absorbing tale for a team of Coolmore owners who are very conscious of the need to give it a lash in the autumn of their ownership careers.
Leger wins from Capri and Order of St George left Aidan on 18 G1 wins once the ICF was done and dusted in 2017.
Sunday’s Moyglare success for Precise leaves him in the same position this time around and you can only wonder where we would be had Lake Victoria, Camille Pissarro, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Kyprios stayed fit.
The retirement of the mighty stayer, who looked in fine fettle parading before the Leger, means that Jan Brueghel’s Coronation Cup success is O’Brien’s sole Galileo G1 winner in 2025.
Finding ten more elite wins to equal that 2017 record is a tall order, but a potent posse of two-year-olds will be accompanying Minnie Hauk, Whirl, Diego Velazquez, Los Angeles, Jan Brueghel, Scandinavia, Lambourn and possibly even Delacroix on their travels this autumn.
So set your watches for a three-month global odyssey taking in world-class races at Newmarket, Longchamp, Saint-Cloud, Ascot, Donny, Keeneland, Del Mar, Sha Tin and possibly Flemington, too.
Time will tell but this might just have the makings of Aidan O’B’s version of Around the World in Ninety Days. Or if you prefer to nick a line from the great Freddie M, the Ballydoyle battalions will be going “any way the wind blows.”
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