Dutch Proverbs

By Stephen Dwyer

In the build up to Royal Ascot, Aidan O’ Brien was a runaway 1/2 favourite to claim the meeting’s leading trainer title. He was a skinny price to do so, no question. Only marginally better was the 4/6 available for Ryan Moore to retain the leading rider award. Even if you doubled the two, it was a 6/4 bet, still short but the most likely winning combination. And so it came to pass.

Four winners from O’ Brien; Power, Fame And Glory, Maybe and Await The Dawn secured the accolade. Three winners for Moore, all on the aforementioned Ballydoyle runners save for Fame And Glory was enough. Moore finished level with Richard Hughes with three winners but his greater amount of placed results captured the leading rider title.

During the course of the five days at Royal Ascot, Aidan O’ Brien unearthed even more superstars from his expansive yard. In the Gold Cup, Fame And Glory became a promising successor to four-time winner Yeats. Despite the defection of pre-race favourite Rite Of Passage, due to a training setback, Fame And Glory was mightily impressive. There were severe doubts over his stamina but these were answered in some style as he won cosily.

Fame And Glory is a high-class horse with a grinding turn of foot, remember that he finished only 1¾ behind Sea The Stars in the 2009 Derby, a race which the O’ Brien horse was favourite for and which his co-owner John Magnier believed he would have won only for the majesty of Sea The Stars.

As it transpires, Ascot is a place where you learn a little every day. On opening day, Cape Blanco finished sixth of seven in the Queen Anne Stakes. This Dante and Irish Derby Winner is a 10f-12f horse, not a miler and he could never be expected to live with Canford Cliffs and Goldikova in the Queen Anne. Lessons learned, all important in the bigger picture.

During the week O’Brien would have very good winners in Power, Await The Dawn and Memory. Yet the master of self-examination on his endless pursuit for excellence will remember Ascot 2011 for his nearly-horse in the £450,000 Prince Of Wales’s Stakes.

Aside from the imperious Frankel, the hype horse of the week was the Australian megastar, So You Think. Bought out of 12-time Melbourne Cup winner Bart Cumming’s yard in New South Wales for an amount believed to be in the region of $30 to $40 million, So You Think was acquired by Coolmore connections last November after finishing third in the Melbourne Cup.

A New-Zealand-bred son of Derby winner High Chaparral, So You Think won five Group One races in Australia. He was World Champion Intermediate Distance Turf Performer and World Champion Extended Distance Performer as well as Australian Champion 3yo before joining the ranks at Rosegreen.

On his first two race starts in Ireland, So You Think won a 10f Group 3 at the Curragh by 10l. He followed this up effortlessly when taking the Group 1 Tattersalls Gold Cup over the same distance. Both times he won at odds hovering around the 1/7 mark. O’ Brien said after his Tattersalls Gold Cup win “He’s incredible – a different creature to what we’ve ever seen before.”

At Ascot hopes were high for the chances of So You Think in the Prince Of Wales’s Stakes. On the day he was backed as if defeat was out of the question and went off the 4/11 favourite. Even Willie Carson buoyed up that you could put your house on him.

The race itself differed greatly from O’ Brien’s game plan. The Ballydoyle pacemaker, Jan Vermeer missed the break completely and the first half furlong was ran at a pedestrian pace. So You Think ran very keen throughout and although he opened up a sizeable lead and expended much energy, his lead was not enough to elude the Godolphin runner, Rewilding. Ridden enterprisingly by Frankie Dettori, Rewilding showed the quicker turn of foot over the last furling and passed So You Think 50 yards before the post, winning by a neck.

Frankie Dettori’s flying dismount ensued, as did a nine day suspension for excessive use of the whip, Dettori having hit the four-year-old 24 times over the last two furlongs.

Aside from the ban, take nothing away from the winner. Rewilding is a seriously good horse. Third in a classic Derby, he is half-brother to Dar Re Mi. He was also sent off favourite for last year’s St. Leger at Doncaster following his demolition of the field in the Great Voltigeur at York. For these reasons against So You Think he was not totally overlooked and his odds almost halved, he went off 17/2 from an opening 12/1. Rewilding was not going down without a fight, and battle he did.

For Aidan O’ Brien, the overall positive of Ascot should have outweighed the negative. Yet, being the perfectionist he is, he personally took responsibility for the defeat of So You Think. He claimed it was a trainer error and that the horse was simply not forward enough for the race.

Despite this admission, there is no real cause for turmoil in the Irish camp. It was a defeat by a neck. Aidan O’ Brien should not lose too much sleep over the defeat of his Australian superstar. The Dutch have a proverb, “Better lose the anchor than the whole ship”.

O’ Brien after all is the admiral of an armada at Ballydoyle and So You Think’s defeat at Ascot is just a shot across the bows.

There will be better days ahead for his Southern Hemisphere import.

Watch this space.

By Stephen Dwyer