ROYAL BLOODLINE Melbourne win heralds the next greatest trainer
Joseph O’Brien and Rekindling’s Melbourne Cup win was the greatest sporting achivement of 2017
TUESDAY, November 7 was a wet morning in Melbourne. Unseasonable rain did not explain why the streets were so quiet, though. Australia has long boasted one of the world’s most sophisticated tourist economies, but on this morning the pickings were slim for visitors. Groups clustered under umbrellas or the awnings of wide streets in the central business district, but many shops and restaurants were closed. All offices were shuttered, too. The focus of the city, its energy, its heart, was already concentrated three miles north of the centre, over Flemington Racecourse.
It was coincidence that brought at least two visitors from this country to Melbourne on this of all days: Melbourne Cup day.
The race that stops a nation is the tag-line, and it certainly brings the city to a juddering standstill. That morning, the local newspapers carried calls for the state holiday marking Cup day to be extended nationwide.
Over 90,000 people cram into Flemington for the day’s action but tens of thousands more throng pubs. It had the feel of St Patrick’s Day, but with a purpose greater than drunkenness for the sake of it; there was the focus and anticipation associated with All-Ireland final day, the excitement detectable around O’Connell Street on those September mornings discernible around this place as well.
By late afternoon, the weather had cleared and the sun was shining. By the time Lloyd Williams was being interviewed after seeing one of the horses he owns win the cup for the sixth time, everyone was wearing sunglasses.
When Joseph O’Brien joined him before the cameras, he was wearing dark glasses, too, sharpening the likeness to his father.
Under the weak sun of an Australian spring, Williams, a veteran owner accustomed to glory, was in raptures when speaking about the trainer of Rekindling.
‘I have been telling anyone who will listen to me that Joseph will be the leading trainer in the world in years to come,’ Williams told an interviewer almost as excited as himself. ‘His father needs to watch out.
‘You have just seen the start of an amazing career kick off right here in Melbourne. He’s an absolutely extraordinary young man and this is an amazing achievement.’
Williams was right on those counts, but when the microphones were pushed under O’Brien’s nose, there was no danger of the trainer suffering from the giddy contagion raging around Flemington.
Shiny TV hosts did their best to maintain the levels of excitement, but in their attempts to turn O’Brien woozy with the drama of it all, they were like men trying to coax fire from ice.
The resemblance between Joseph and Aidan became more marked as he deflected increasingly desperate entreaties to lose the run of himself with gentle declarations of joy and a determination to spread the credit.
But there was no hiding the magnitude of what he had done: at 24 years of age, Joseph O’Brien was the youngest winning trainer in the 156-year history of the race, and he was the story on the biggest day in Australian sport, after victory in the most treasured two-mile horse race in the world. He had succeeded in stopping more
than one nation.
Australia was agog, but so, when they woke some hours later, were Britain and Ireland and points beyond these islands, too.
There has still been no British winner of the Melbourne Cup, while Rekindling won by beating Johannes Vermeer, trained by Aidan, into second place. Willie Mullins completed an Irish one-twothree with Max Dynamite in third. ‘I think it is their attention to detail,’ said Williams in explaining the O’Brien story, ‘that is what it is all about, and a wonderful, instinctive knowledge of horses.’ That is as close as anyone has come to explaining the story of Joseph O’Brien.
He is his father’s son, a status that has been used against him but which, for all the advantages it has conferred, also accounts for a ferocious appetite for work, as well as a seeming instinctive understanding of horses.
Aidan started his training career in Piltown, at the stables of his father-in-law Joe Crowley, but John Magnier and the Coolmore operation kept an eye on the young man, eventually taking a chance on him and trusting him with the Ballydoyle operation after the retirement of Vincent O’Brien.
The family moved to Tipperary and when he was a child, Joseph would be in the passenger seat of his father’s jeep, already fitted with a love for horses and constantly absorbing the knowledge needed to make passion work for him.
As they drove past a particular horse, Joseph might notice it wasn’t wearing a bandage on its knee when it had the day before. Why, he would ask his dad? The devotion to the littlest detail that distinguishes his father was passed on to the son.
In a seven-year career in the saddle, Joseph was Ireland’s champion jockey twice, with 10 Classic winners and two Derby triumphs. The
He will be the leading trainer in the world... his father needs to watch out
first of those, on Camelot in 2012, was the first time a father and son combined to win the prestigious race.
He was Irish champion later that year, at the age of 19, with 87 winners, and retained the title a year later with 126 victories.
He stopped riding in 2016 at the age of 22, and towards the end of the previous year he had indicated the direction of his thinking.
‘I can’t ride forever and I never thought that I would do. I would hope to ride next year but honestly don’t know. Nine stone was tough at the end of this season ... I am not going to kill myself worrying about it.’
He is a big man, standing six feet tall, and tying to whittle his frame down to nine stone required unceasing vigilance.
Instead, he started his training career with instant success. On June 6, 2016, his first day holding a trainer’s licence, he had four winners across two meetings, the first of which was Justice Frederick in Gowran Park.
In saddling a winner on his first day, he emulated Aidan, who managed the same feat in 1993, the year Joseph was born.
‘It’s a massive day for us all,’ said his father. ‘I couldn’t believe when someone said to me that it was 23 years ago to the meeting that I had my first winner with Wandering Thoughts. I couldn’t believe that, it is some coincidence.’
Nepotism was the inevitable accusation during his riding career, and he was certainly afforded fabulous opportunities through the most powerful bloodstock operation in the world.
His talent was clear, though, and it has shone through the first 18 months of his young trainer’s life, too.
He is back in Piltown, working the yard of his maternal grandfather and from where his father launched the most brilliant training career in the world.
Again, favouritism is the sneer that follows O’Brien, and he has a stable that boasts horses from Coolmore, JP McManus and Williams, too.
However, where someone like McManus is known for the support he gives trainers, he is no fool, and some of his best stock is with Joseph O’Brien for one reason: he is very, very good at what he does.
He saddled a Group One winner within six months of starting his training career, but even before he had his trainer’s licence, he was helping oversee Ivanovich Gorbatov, winner of the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham last year and trained officially by Aidan.
The challenge now is gauging himself against the success of his father. It is a story as old as time, the son struggling to measure himself against the paterfamilias, but in trying to do so, O’Brien is merely doing what every ambitious trainer in the world is trying to do.
Aidan is the mark, a point emphasised by his worldrecord-breaking 28 Group One winners this year.
The younger man, though, provided one of the unforgettable sporting stories of 2017. He is growing irresistibly into greatness. For this year at least, there was no greater feat in Irish sport.