It is all, it seems, in the tweaks. So said Aidan O’Brien, Ireland’s master-trainer supreme, before his tough filly Magical defeated Ghaiyyath, the world’s highest-rated horse, in the Irish Champion Stakes on Saturday. He wouldn’t have run her against the relentless galloper who had beaten Magical the month before, he insisted, if he hadn’t felt there was something he could tweak to make the difference. If ever there was a man in racing who shouldn’t have any regrets it is Aidan O’Brien, but in a fascinating Racing Post interview last week with David Jennings Aidan revealed: ‘Every single race we’re beaten in hurts. The bigger the race the more it hurts. If it doesn’t hurt it doesn’t get into your heart. If it doesn’t get into your heart it means you will never want to make things better.’
Aidan is now nearly as famous as a sire as he is as a trainer. Sons Joseph, 27, and Donnacha, 22, after stellar careers in the saddle, are now becoming serious rivals to him, running their own training establishments. And if there was ever a race that hurt Joseph in his riding days it was Camelot’s St Leger in 2012. Camelot came to the world’s oldest Classic as odds-on favourite that year seeking the elusive Triple Crown after winning the 2000 Guineas and Derby for Aidan and Joseph. But he lost out to 25–1 shot Encke by three quarters of a length. On Saturday Joseph, who had won the race as a jockey on Leading Light, did some painful-memory erasing by training the St Leger winner Galileo Chrome and in doing so became the first to both ride and train a winner of the Leger since the ‘Head Waiter’ Harry Wragg in the 1960s. It was the young trainer’s first English Classic and there will assuredly be more.
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