Aidan O’Brien is a superb trainer. You name it: he has won it. The Derby nine times, the Irish Derby 15. The 2000 Guineas ten times, the Irish 2000 on a dozen occasions. This year he passed the worldwide total of 400 Group One or Grade One victories.
He is an innately modest man who always credits every member of his team and suggests the big decisions are made by ‘the Lads’ of the Coolmore operation, John Magnier, Michael Tabor, Derek Smith, et al. But that doesn’t mean Aidan cannot be extravagant in praising his winners, notably the progressive youngsters: the multi-billion dollar operation that is Coolmore is, after all, in the stallion-making business. Many have been praised along the way as the fastest he has trained, the most resolute, the most consistent.
But his language last Saturday after City of Troy won Newmarket’s Dewhurst Stakes on Future Champions Day was from a different lexicon. It was as if he was describing an animal arrived from outer space with something more than flesh and blood about his makeup. Labelling him unequivocally as the best two-year-old he has ever trained, Aiden said City of Troy hated the gluey ground ‘but the stride on him is incredible. He just never gets tired. I’ve never before seen a horse that doesn’t get tired. I’ve never had a horse we don’t know where the limit is. We push them to the limit but we can never find his limit’.
And it wasn’t just Aidan. The octogenarian ex-bookmaker Michael Tabor, a man who knows how to write a betting slip with plenty of noughts, said: ‘I know the way Aidan speaks but we’re all optimists. This horse is special – the real deal.’ Even jockey Ryan Moore, who would as soon be heard gushing about a horse’s potential as Jacob Rees-Mogg would be saying complimentary things about the BBC, agreed that the first time he had ridden City of Troy at The Curragh, ‘He did something a horse had never done to me before: I couldn’t stop him.
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