Anyone can grasp the idea of a world record. It’s the best, ever – simples. Aidan O’Brien is closing in on the world record for Group One winners in a year.
This weekend Ireland’s champion trainer has runners in Australia, Canada and at Ascot’s prestigious Champions Day card. It’s not out of the question he could break the record over just two days. Being racing of course, it’s not simple at all.
The sport’s nuances has always made it a tough sell to the uninitiated or disinterested. It’s why it can feel unappreciated sometimes. The resentful claim used to be that in no other global sport is Ireland more consistently a world leader. Then golf came along. And golf is easy to grasp. What O’Brien is doing in 2016 is astounding. It’s just not straightforward to quantify.
The record is held by the late American trainer Bobby Frankel, the man who the famous racehorse is named after. In 2003 he won 25 Grade/Group One North American flat races, the elite category which on this side of the Atlantic includes races like the Derby, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and the Irish Champion Stakes.
Where it gets complicated is how Ireland’s dominant jumps trainer Willie Mullins saddled 34 Grade One National Hunt winners in the recent 2015-16 season, which backed on to 33 top-flight victories in 2014-15. Even in calendar year terms, might Mullins actually be the benchmark: except that’s not really comparing like with like since jump racing is mostly confined to Ireland, Britain and France.
Last week O’Brien had two more Group One winners at Newmarket, bringing his tally for a vintage flat season to 20. With international opportunities extending to Hong Kong in December, it’s only evens about him breaking the record. Except most bookmakers are also counting Ivanovich Gorbatov’s Triumph Hurdle success at Cheltenham in March, by which tot the trainer only needs four to tie.
But O’Brien was only technically the trainer of that horse since he openly acknowledged his son Joseph did the training and he simply hadn’t managed to secure an official licence yet. And even though the Triumph is a Grade One jumps race, is it right to make comparisons with a record established purely on the flat?
Training racehorses
It’s all very complicated and to those whose racing interest extends little beyond a once-a-year Grand National bet, talk of such a world record can probably seem even more impenetrable than the task of unravelling what can often appear to be an endless cycle of brown quadrupeds running around a field with wiry and garishly-dressed people on their backs.
The job of training racehorses also requires context. It’s the horses that do the running. Jockeys do the other athletic bit. In contrast O’Brien can cut an unimposing bespectacled figure. The most obvious comparison is with managers or coaches. But precisely measuring management merit is similarly impossible since so much is based on the talent they have at their disposal.
Is Zinedine Zidane the best manager simply because Real Madrid wins the Champions League, or could any competent professional do the same with similar material?
To which Zizou might respond he had enough about him to get appointed in the first place. And to which O’Brien, if he altered his modest public image, might point out how he’s still in charge of the Ballydoyle stables 20 years after being first appointed. Perhaps it’s that which underpins a widespread sense that if there’s a world record to be broken, it’s only O’Brien’s due to break it.
“Over the years at Ballydoyle there have been various top jockeys and for one reason or another they’ve all been replaced. But it would be a much harder job to replace the trainer,” says Eddie Lynam, a multiple-Group One -winning trainer also.
“I think Aidan will go for it (the record) and break it. And if anyone breaks it again further down the line, it will be him. He’s the best I’ve seen in my time in the game. Year on year he keeps stretching things; like he won a classic with Qualify (the 2015 Oaks at 50/1) and I don’t think anyone else would have.
“Now, you could be sinful and say 17 of the 21 this year have been by Galileo (Coolmore Stud’s dominant stallion) and we all know how much of an influence that horse is. But Aidan is still a very special trainer,” Lynam adds.
O’Brien has redrawn the boundaries of racing success and at only 47 the statistical limits of what he may ultimately achieve are boundless. Comparisons to the legendary Vincent O’Brien, who created Ballydoyle, and transformed the industry in Ireland and worldwide, have been as plentiful as use of the word “genius” in relation to his successor.
There are those, however, who will argue any success rate with training racehorses is primarily about the quality of animal you have to work with rather than ideas of genius. They insist O’Brien’s spectacular rate of success would be replicated by other legendary training figures such as Dermot Weld, Jim Bolger or John Oxx had they the same overwhelming depth of material to work with.
Of course the overarching influence of Coolmore in Ireland’s horse game means such comments are rarely aired for public consumption, as rare as finding anyone to publicly or privately argue that O’Brien isn’t a master of his profession, completely dedicated to the task of maintaining the stream of stallions to Coolmore’s lucrative breeding business.
Perfect cog
It’s the irony then of this potentially record-breaking season that it has been built on a remarkable run of success for Ballydoyle fillies. Found led home an astonishing 1-2-3 for O’Brien in the Arc and on Saturday she will be joined by Minding and Seventh Heaven on Ascot’s Champions Day card. In contrast, only a single three-year-old colt has won a Group One this season and The Gurkha is retired.
“As a breeding operation Coolmore has proved to be so far ahead of everyone else and that wheel has found a perfect cog in Aidan who has always been full of excellence,” says renowned jumps trainer Edward O’Grady.
“It’s always assumed everyone successful has a secret, whatever that secret is. But I would say Aidan’s success is down to his expertise, dedication and the talent at his disposal. It must be extremely hard to sustain the levels of excellence he has all the time. If you’re a soccer manager, you’re only focussed so many weeks of the year. But Aidan isn’t renowned for holidays!” he adds.
Comparisons with MV O’Brien have been inevitable ever since AP O’Brien was invited to take over at Ballydoyle in 1996 by Coolmore supremo John Magnier. Such comparisons could easily have swamped a lesser figure. Instead Aidan O’Brien thrived, forging his own family dynasty in the process.
All four of his children have ridden winners. His eldest son, Joseph, was champion jockey and is now training under his own name. Another, Donnacha, will be crowned champion apprentice this year. O’Brien has played down the significance of exceeding Frankel’s tally, but he is intensely competitive and not unaware of his place in racing history.
Statistical superiority might not tell a full sporting story but it’s hardly irrelevant either in how such stories are portrayed.
“I don’t think you can compare with MV. The racing programme has altered quite a lot. He was creating potential stallions whose careers had to be protected because they were going to be syndicated with X number of shareholders. The vast majority of potential stallions in Ballydoyle now are effectively owned by the end-user and don’t come on the market.
“There’s a much improved programme for older horses now too so therefore more top horses stay in training and Aidan can prepare them to hit the world stage,” O’Grady considers.
There’s also the question of numbers. Up to 200 horses are in training in Ballydoyle. Vincent O’Brien rarely trained more than 60 horses at any one time. Globalisation means his successor can run Sir Isaac Newton in Saturday morning’s Caulfield Cup in Melbourne and Idaho in Sunday night’s Canadian International in Toronto. Moreover, it is logistically unremarkable.
It is the sort of reach that gives credibility to world record talk for the world’s most successful trainer. Within the global horse game, O’Brien’s numbers overshadow everyone else. They reflect a level of dominance Rory McIlroy can only aspire to. Whether that makes him the best, even now, never mind in the long history of the turf, is impossible to establish for certain.
But by any measure we are witnessing something extraordinary.
