“No, never,” Aidan O’Brien says with feeling, to a suggestion that a winner of the Breeders’ Cup Classic is a personal ambition. “No race would ever be on my mind, we’d always make every decision and do the right thing for the horse. It’s not about us. It’s always about the horse.”
It is a sign of the single-minded dedication to what is best for his horses that has carried O’Brien to a record 26 Group One winners this year. But while the question was never going to prompt a Keeganesque rant – “I tell you what, I will love it, love it if Churchill beats them on Saturday” – O’Brien would not be human if he did not wonder, every now and then, what he has to do to win the Classic.
Giant’s Causeway, beaten a neck by Tiznow in 2000, Henrythenavigator, the runner-up behind John Gosden’s Raven’s Pass in 2008 and Declaration Of War, beaten a nose and a head into third in 2013, have all gone close in the Breeders’ Cup’s showpiece event.
Galileo, a Derby winner and the sire of so many of O’Brien’s subsequent champions, was beaten into sixth in 2001, while the Group One winners Hawk Wing, Gleneagles, So You Think, Rip Van Winkle and Oratorio all finished out of the frame. Most painful of all is the memory of George Washington’s fatal injury on a filthy day at Monmouth Park in 2007, a year after he had finished sixth in the Classic at Churchill Downs.
O’Brien’s failure to win the Classic is not for want of trying, and there would certainly be no better way to round off his record-breaking season than a victory for either Churchill, the 2,000 Guineas winner, or the dirt-bred War Decree on Saturday night.
The field lined up against them includes last year’s winner, Arrogate, and Gun Runner, the winner of three Grade One races this summer by an aggregate of 22 lengths, and Churchill is a 20-1 outsider to win on his first run on dirt, but stranger things have already happened for O’Brien during the course of this extraordinary year. Only half of his 26 winners were SP favourites, and his haul includes victories at 40-1 – in the Derby at Epsom, no less – and 20-1.
“We’ve tried, and that’s all you can do,” O’Brien says of his many attempts to win a Classic. “Churchill is really being put into the lion’s den, he’s never raced on anything but grass, [but] he’s big and strong and powerful, he has all the attributes [of dirt horses]. He’s not there on a false thing, he’s tough and he’s had plenty of racing.
“We were very happy with his run [into third in the QEII Stakes] at Ascot, he didn’t get the greatest of runs and got stopped twice over a furlong out. It was always a possibility that we would come for the Classic.”
The first of O’Brien’s 11 Breeders’ Cup winners to date came on the dirt, when Johannesburg took the Juvenile in 2001. He will have a fancied runner in this same race this year when US Navy Flag, the winner of both the Middle Park and Dewhurst Stakes this autumn, takes on the best dirt-bred juveniles, and the decision to send him onto an unfamiliar surface was, as always, carefully considered.
“We’ve pushed the boundaries out with him all the time, with every run,” O’Brien says of a colt who has started favourite for just one of his 10 starts to date, a maiden event at The Curragh back in May in which he finished third. “In all fairness, he’s really stacked up his runs.”
O’Brien still has a long way to go to match D Wayne Lukas’s record of 20 winners at the meeting, but it will be disappointing if a 14-strong team from his yard does not add to his already unprecedented Group One total in 2017 over the course of the weekend in California.
“We don’t ever think anything or expect anything,” he said this week. “We take one race at a time and one horse at a time and that’s the reality, it’s all we can ever do.” But if the one horse could be Churchill, and the one race the Classic, what a sweet moment it would be.
Friday tips
Newmarket 12.35 Porth Swtan 1.10 Zamperini 1.45 All Out 2.20 Consequences 2.55 Star Story (nap) 3.30 Sunblazer 4.05 Brilliant Vanguard
Wetherby 12.50 Alfie’s Choice 1.25 Work Du Breteau 2.00 Malaya 2.35 Samtegal (nb) 3.10 Aristo Du Plessis 3.45 Carlos Du Fruitier
Uttoxeter 1.00 Dame De Compagnie 1.35 Who’s My Jockey 2.10 Kenyan 2.45 River Wylde 3.20 Cobolobo 3.55 Maid Of Milan
Newcastle 5.45 Meandmyshadow 6.15 Elegaic 6.45 Francis Xavier 7.15 Glacier Fox 7.45 Equiano Springs 8.15 Casterbridge 8.45 Windforpower 9.15 Young Tiger
