Get Timeform's verdict on the King George

King George reaction: Timeform's Rory King on Caladangan's win

By Rory King

Horse Racing

Sun July 27, 2025 · 5M ago

Timeform's Rory King on Calandagan's King George win and what will the next move of the Jan Brueghel team be?

Just a handful of runners for the King George but this looked an enthralling race beforehand, all the more so considering the apparent tactical dynamic seemed to have a fair amount of jeopardy about it.

How fast would Continuous go? Getting the fractions spot on like had been the case in the Coronation Cup would drag Calandagan into a battle he might not have the answers for. Going too fast would risk setting things up for the French-trained gelding, or even one of the other Group 1 winners in the race.

Not going fast enough surely wouldn’t be an option, given Jan Brueghel is a St Leger winner who was heading for the Melbourne Cup last year before the vets intervened and surely wouldn’t have the gears for Calandagan if the race was to bring a turn of foot to the fore.

Yet that’s exactly what happened. Continuous broke marginally better than his stablemate but it was very quickly apparent the plan was to sit on Jan Brueghel’s quarters, perhaps help to push him on that way, and were Continuous to get in the way of some of the others as things hotted up, all the better.

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In hindsight, the fitting of cheekpieces on Jan Brueghel an indication that something different may be afoot. But, just as connections had got things wrong with the tactics (or, more specifically, the pace) in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes with Continuous and Los Angeles, the same thing happened here but for the opposite reason, perhaps afraid of a repeat from the Royal meeting in terms of overdoing the pace.

Jan Brueghel is rather idle, he’d never made the running outright before and it didn’t seem to suit him. Even with the headgear on, Moore was having to niggle at him from 4f out and he was simply swamped for speed when first Kalpana and then Calandagan were unleashed with their efforts early in the straight. For him to thrive at the top level over this trip you get the impression he needs a war. Perhaps these tactics would have worked much better had the horse in front been Los Angeles rather than Jan Brueghel.

The different tactical element is an interesting factor to monitor for the second half of the season. And perhaps O’Brien will mix it up further in other top races, a return to the days of more than one pacemaker an option, certainly for Jan Brueghel, but perhaps too if Lambourn is now required to take up the mantle in the Arc.

In the famous King George of 1975 Bustino had 2 pacemakers in his bid to run the sting out of Grundy.

What happens now at York?

As for Calandagan, it’s worth remembering how well he ran in the Juddmonte International last year when coming from a long way back to chase home City of Troy who – in a neat bit of symmetry – made the running rather unexpectedly.

We’ve become somewhat reliant on the Juddmonte in recent years to be the race of the summer, but that really does seem like being the case again. And here’s hoping York in three and a half weeks will conclusively crown the top middle-distance horse of the season because this King George left me doing some head scratching.