Brian O'Connor was at the official flat race launch yesterday where the 'feelgood factor' was never as high among Irish racing's elite
EVEN THE sun played ball with the official flat race launch by Horse Racing Ireland in Dublin yesterday when it shone down on the great and the good of the summer game with perfect timing.
Considering Ireland's flat season actually began over two months ago, HRI's own timing might have been more questionable. However, since the media focus has only now started to move away from the more raucously egalitarian jumping branch of the sport, the Public Relations beast resolutely followed its own clock yesterday.
Sure enough, Aidan O'Brien, Jim Bolger, John Oxx, Pat Smullen and many of the rest of the leading players of the flat were wheeled out to talk up the summer programme and their own prospects of success, both nationally and internationally.
For large swathes of the resolutely National Hunt population, such a prospect holds little or no appeal. But even if the more cerebral antics of the summer don't have as much of a hold on the popular imagination as jumping fences, that doesn't mean there's not some extraordinary stuff going on. After all it's only four days since Henrythenavigator and New Approach fought out a titanic all-Irish finish to the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket.
"We're in a golden period now. Some people might not appreciate how golden it is but we're in the middle of something special," Oxx told the assembled media.
"There was another one in the 1960s when Vincent O'Brien and Paddy Prendergast topped the statistics in Britain and we're back to that now with Aidan (O'Brien) doing so well."
That provoked an embarrassed grin from the champion trainer himself who only last Saturday edged out his mentor Jim Bolger in that Guineas finish. Yesterday the cut and thrust between O'Brien and Bolger was just verbal but the most significant part of the "verbals" was the variety of names both men had on hand.
In the past, such events used to focus on the Ballydoyle battalions while everyone else maintained a plucky facade that they were even operating on the same front as the Coolmore monolith.
However, while O'Brien will throw Duke Of Marmalade at the Tattersalls Gold Cup later this month, Bolger will have Finsceal Beo for the same race - "And I'm really looking forward to her".
New Approach will definitely run in the Irish 2,000, and possibly another clash with Henrythenavigator, while Saoirse Abu will go for the 1,000.
There was even time for Bolger to play down any supposed slight to the Epsom Derby by New Approach skipping the race, although characteristically not even a hint of him changing his mind: "I prefer to go the Irish Guineas route to the Irish Derby . . . but I love Epsom. When I was a paid hand I used to forsake a day's holidays just to watch the race!"
O'Brien has already won two Group One races this season and could be represented in both the French Guineas races on Sunday at Longchamp where Georgebernardshaw and Psalm possibly look his main contenders.
But it wasn't even just an O'Brien-Bolger double act. Dermot Weld wasn't present but his own Classic contenders include Chinese White (Irish Oaks), Famous Name (Irish 2,000 Guineas), Winchester (Irish Derby) and Mad About You (Irish 1,000 Guineas.) That Curragh fillies Classic is also a target for Oxx's highly-rated Katiyra while the lack of depth in the Irish sprinting division might just be filled by Myboycharlie after Fozzy Stack revealed yesterday the Prix Morny winner will skip the Guineas in favour of the Greenlands Stakes at the Curragh.
Even the Curragh itself had its own little report with a projected finish line of 2010 for the €100 million facelift to the headquarters track that will continue later this year. Throw in a new Derby sponsor in Dubai Duty Free and there was more than a little of that vital "feelgood factor" floating around: considerably more in fact than was provoked by a less than brilliant winter in the very top races by their jumping brethren.
And when the PR bods start looking to the flat rather than the jumps for their headlines, then you know Oxx is right when he talks of a golden period.
