It was always likely to appear at some stage in Aidan O’Brien’s extraordinary season and in the winner’s enclosure after his 1-2 in last Friday’s Fillies’ Mile, there it was: the “B” word. “Don’t you think,” someone muttered as Rhododendron was led back to unsaddle, “that’s it’s getting a little bit boring?”
For anyone who appreciates how difficult it is to win Group One races, the answer is simple. Of course not. Instead, it is ever more astonishing to watch as O’Brien compiles what is, by several measures, the most successful campaign that the British turf has ever seen.
So far in 2016, and with the richest card of the year at Ascot on Saturday still to come, O’Brien has won more than £7m in prize money in Britain and 11 of the 30 Group Ones. Four of the five Group One races that remain will be run on Champions Day and O’Brien has the favourite or second-favourite for three, as well as an odds-on chance in the Long Distance Cup, a Group Two. A good day will take him past £8m in prize money and a really good day, a long way towards £9m.
At the end of last year, when John Gosden became the first trainer to win more than £5m in a British season and finished with £5.3m, it looked like a record that would endure for a few years at least.
O’Brien passed him in August and since then he has, if anything, picked up the pace. Runners from Ballydoyle have won seven of the last 12 Group Ones in Britain and his 122 runners have won more money than Gosden and Richard Hannon, the next two trainers in the list, put together. Between them, Gosden and Hannon have saddled nearly 1,700 horses in 2016.
And what is truly remarkable is that O’Brien has done all this without a top-class, middle-distance three-year-old colt. He had to settle for second place in the Derby, the richest race of the British season, while The Gurkha, the French Derby winner and O’Brien’s one exceptional colt from the Classic generation, ran his last race in July and was retired after suffering an injury a few weeks later.
It seems a long time ago now but O’Brien’s season started with the disappointment of Air Force Blue, last year’s champion juvenile, finishing 12th of 13 in the 2,000 Guineas. Minding, 2015’s best juvenile filly, took the 1,000 Guineas the following day and his record-breaking campaign has been built around fillies, the best of which form the core of his Champions Day team.
Minding, who also took the Oaks, is joined by Found, who won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, Europe’s richest race, at Chantilly less than a fortnight ago. Seventh Heaven, unraced since beating Found in the Yorkshire Oaks in August, will start favourite for the Fillies & Mares Stakes and the only male horse from Ballydoyle with an obvious chance is Order Of St George, the Gold Cup winner, in the stayers’ race.
As a result, bookmakers are nervously repeating the mantra normally reserved for the Willie Mullins-trained runners on the first day at Cheltenham: they can’t all win, they can’t all win.
“If Aidan O’Brien bags a four-timer, it will be a bookie bloodbath,” Jon Ivan-Duke, of William Hill, said on Friday and, for once, the extravagant language is not entirely for show. Online punters bet at board prices rather than SP because, with almost every firm offering “Best Odds Guaranteed”, it would be daft to do anything else. If the juggernaut really starts to roll, there is not a huge amount that the layers can do to get out of the way.
Hills were offering 33-1 on Friday afternoon about an O’Brien four-timer, though anyone who shops around should be able to get something like 50-1. Highly unlikely, in other words, but a long way from impossible, and O’Brien’s most loyal backers do have quite a lot of the bookies’ money to play with. A level £1 stake on all of his runners in Britain this year is currently showing a profit of around £30.
It is true that O’Brien has not enjoyed unbridled success on Champions Day since its arrival in the calendar five years ago, with only two winners — one each in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes and Long Distance Cup — so far. The Champion Stakes, meanwhile, is one of the few British Group One races he has yet to win, either at Ascot or Newmarket, its previous home.
But O’Brien has never had a season quite like this one. The American trainer Bobby Frankel’s all-time record of 25 Grade One winners in a calendar year — set in a country which stages more than 100 — is now within sight, as O’Brien has won 20 top-flight races on the Flat in 2016 and another over jumps at Cheltenham in March.
By Saturday evening, expect him to be within touching distance.
