The turf | 7 June 2018

In the previous 17 runnings of the Derby this century no fewer than nine had been won by horses trained in Ireland. The Ballydoyle genius Aidan O’Brien had won four out of the last six for ‘the lads’ behind the Coolmore operation, and with his Saxon Warrior (already the winner of this season’s 2,000 Guineas) the odds-on favourite at Epsom, and four more O’Brien horses in the field of 12, bookies and punters alike were expecting this year to be ‘déjà vu all over again’.

The day before, O’Brien and the lads had won the Oaks, the fillies’ equivalent, with Forever Together, sired like so many of their winners by the 2001 Derby winner Galileo and ridden by Aidan’s youngest son Donnacha. In second place in that race, a position he had twice before occupied in the Derby, was William Buick, first-choice rider for the familiar blue silks of Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin operation. That night, Charlie Appleby, for the past five years one of Sheikh Mo’s two British-based trainers, went home wondering, as he had for a while, ‘just what we had to do to get in front of Coolmore’.

The next day, as the Buick-ridden, Appleby-trained Masar powered home to win the Derby from Dee Ex Bee and Roaring Lion, with Saxon Warrior only in fourth, much of the racing world shared the obvious joy of the sometimes formidably hawk-eyed Sheikh Mohammed and the Dubai ruler’s family. It is not that they, or any one of us, can resent the phenomenal successes of Aidan and his team. Son Donnacha, as modest and intelligent a 19-year-old as you could find worldwide, is only the latest prodigy stamped out in that hard-working, self-deprecating O’Brien mould. But competition is the essence of racing.