Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Among successful trainers, O’Brien in a league of his own
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The National Football League has the New England Patriots. Thoroughbred horse racing has Aidan O’Brien.
Year after year there is no down year for the Patriots, nor for O’Brien. Each season the horses pass through the O’Brien system like the lineage of receivers plugged into the New England offense, talented inherently, honed by the enterprise that envelops and develops them.
Aidan O’Brien might as well be Bill Belichick, the craggy Patriots coach.
Belichick has his trademark rumpled sweatshirts; O’Brien has his trademark rumpled speech patterns. Both have mastered the art of talking without saying anything.
Information flows from Camp Patriots like a stream trickling through the desert. Sunday, the day before final fields for Breeders’ Cup races were to be drawn here, Breeders’ Cup racing officials still wondered exactly who O’Brien was sending. That is not unusual.
The NFL has parity as a motivating force, yet New England under Belichick never is not good. O’Brien also has set the bar up near the ozone.
O’Brien, after a recordsetting 2017, when he broke Bobby Frankel’s record for Group or Grade 1 wins in a calendar year, by his standards had a relatively quiet 2018; part of the reason for that was a virus that afflicted his stable over the summer.
“We went through a quiet spell,” O’Brien said, reached by phone last week, “but they’re running well again.”
For O’Brien, a quiet year means 14 Group 1 tallies - the envy of nearly any horse trainer – with two months of worldwide racing still on the calendar.
Belichick has billionaire owner Robert Kraft backing him. O’Brien has global powerhouse Coolmore behind him.
At his Ballydoyle training center in County Tipperary, Ireland, the scores of bluebloods parade out of the stables and onto the gallops, the boyish man in Harry Potter glasses watching over them, querying every one of the dozens of riders following exercise. Stable employees are always called “The Team,” and O’Brien never misses a chance to credit them after a success. The Coolmore principals are always called “The Lads,” as in, “We’ll talk to the lads and see what they want to do.”
For the Patriots the ultimate goal is the Super Bowl. Now imagine if they played several Super Bowls around the globe. In Dubai, on the mega-millions Dubai World Cup program, O’Brien has four Group 1 wins. Last December, he won his second Group 1 in Hong Kong, both with Highland Reel in the Hong Kong Vase, part of the rich Hong Kong International Races card. He has won the Group 1 Cox Plate, one of Australia’s premier races.
The European classics? O’Brien’s record there alone is akin to a dozen Super Bowls. O’Brien has won 72 classic races in Ireland, England, and France. Seventy-two! And the total is 77 if one counts the Irish St. Leger, which is open to older horses and thus not a classic race – restricted to 3-year-olds – in the strict sense of the term.
O’Brien has won 335 Group or Grade 1 races, more than any trainer ever.
O’Brien has launched the training career of his elder son, Joseph, who at 28 has scores of horses in his own yard and won his first classic (as a trainer) this past spring when Latrobe captured the Irish Derby.
O’Brien’s four children all are or have been jockeys as well as exercise riders at Ballydoyle. His daughter Ana, 22, has ridden professionally and was fortunate to avoid permanently damaging injury in a spill this past spring riding a horse for Joseph. Ana’s sister Sara, 23, has ridden amateur races. Joseph was a champion rider before growing too tall and heavy, but Donnacha, 20, is in full bloom. He rode two classic winners for his father this year, Saxon Warrior in the English 2000 Guineas and Forever Together in the Epsom Oaks and was aboard Latrobe for his brother in the Irish Derby.
Joseph speaks and appears to act a lot like Aidan; Donnacha has a less idiosyncratic air. He might, for instance, have more to say about his children’s remarkable racing success than this:
“That’s the best of all, really. It’s great they’re so interested.”
That was all O’Brien offered on the matter over the phone and across the ocean. He can, to be fair, provide richer detail when encountering a familiar European journalist in the flesh. Do not expect Americanstyle over-sharing.
The European flat season is down to its last gasps (O’Brien won the last Group 1 in England, the Vertem Futurity Trophy Stakes, with the 2-year-old Magna Grecia; Donnacha rode), but now comes what sometimes actually is referred to as the Super Bowl of horse racing – the Breeders’ Cup.
O’Brien, who turned 49 on Oct. 16 – he still looks 29, perhaps owing in part to his membership in the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association – began training at Ballydoyle in 1996. In 1998, he had his first Breeders’ Cup runner, Second Empire, who finished sixth in the BC Mile. The following year, O’Brien had four more runners, none of which cracked the top three. O’Brien broke through with his first Breeders’ Cup winner in 2001 when Johannesburg landed the Juvenile.
Now? Aidan O’Brien, a trainer who runs a stable about 3,000 miles from America, home of the Breeders’ Cup, ranks third in earnings among all Breeders’ Cup trainers. He has started 124 horses in Breeders’ Cup races, third-most behind D. Wayne Lukas and Todd Pletcher, and won 12 races, third behind Lukas and Bob Baffert.
Lukas, Baffert, and Pletcher, it should be noted, have a combined zero career starters in Ireland.
O’Brien pre-entered 17 horses in Breeders’ Cup races this year, more than any other trainer, and even after leaving some of those pre-entrants home he might start more horses at the two-day event than any other horseman. O’Brien’s assessment of his strike force headed to Louisville?
“They’re very hard races to win. You have to take one day at a time.” Positively Belichickian! There are few great races O’Brien has failed to win. One is the Breeders’ Cup Classic, though not for lack of trying.
O’Brien has started 16 horses in 15 different BC Classics, beginning with the pair of Black Minnaloushe and Galileo in the 2001 Classic. Galileo would go on to be Coolmore’s foundation stallion, the best sire in the world, but couldn’t produce his best race on dirt, finishing sixth in the Classic. Twice O’Brien has run second, with Henrythenavigator in 2008 and more memorably in 2000, right here at Churchill, with Giant’s Causeway, who was turned back by Tiznow in an epic battle, falling a neck short.
Now comes Mendelssohn, who is making his second trip to Churchill this year and fifth from Ireland to the United States. Coolmore paid $3 million for Mendelssohn at a yearling auction to try, essentially, to win two races – the Classic and the Kentucky Derby. Mendelssohn is by the Coolmore sire Scat Daddy and out of Leslie’s Lady, the dam of Grade 1-winning dirt horse and now top stallion Into Mischief and the great dirt-champion mare Beholder. Mendelssohn made his dirt debut in the UAE Derby on the Dubai World Cup card and won by a staggering 18 1/2 lengths, and everything was going swimmingly until Mendelssohn went swimming here in the Derby. Heavy rain turned the Churchill track to slop, and Mendelssohn became a fish out of water.
“American dirt racing is very aggressive at the best of times, but when the weather goes like that the aggression turns nearly into savagery,” O’Brien said the day after the Derby.
Mendelssohn was not ready for it, and O’Brien took him back to Ballydoyle – but only to get him ready for more American dirt racing.
Mendelssohn on July 7 contested the pace and tired to third in the Dwyer Stakes at Belmont. Back to Ireland, then back to New York for the Travers Stakes, where Mendelsson set a strong pace but was no match for victorious Catholic Boy, though he improved to finish second. Back to Ireland, then back to New York for the Jockey Club Gold Cup on Sept. 29 at Belmont. Diversify, the best older handicap horse on the East Coast this year, set a wicked pace that left him gasping, but Mendelssohn, hot on his heels, stuck around much longer, finishing third, beaten only two lengths.
“We’ve been very happy. We think he has progressed with all his three runs, really,” O’Brien said.
Okay, then. What about training Mendelssohn to race on dirt at home, where there is no dirt? “They’re all on their own programs, really. We train each horse by what we think will suit him.”
Fine. O’Brien doesn’t have to answer that question. The answer is right there in front of us. Lacking the ability to truly train his horse for dirt at Ballydoyle, O’Brien has flown Mendelssohn back and forth to the United States all year practicing for the ultimate goal, the Super Bowl, the Breeders’ Cup Classic.
Maybe it will work, maybe not. O’Brien has had a long time to tinker, yet Johannesburg 17 years ago is one of only two of his horses that have won on American dirt from 63 starts. O’Brien also has runners this weekend in the Juvenile Turf Sprint, the Juvenile Turf, the Juvenile Fillies Turf, the Turf Sprint, the Filly and Mare Turf, the Mile, and the Turf. He will probably complete one of those passes.
But Belichick and the Patriots are famous for going for it on fourth down. Aidan O’Brien won’t be punting, either, in his quest to win the Classic.