“If you played it safe all the time, life would get very boring.” That was the somewhat rueful verdict of Aidan O’Brien after City of Troy had finished eighth in the Breeders’ Cup Classic on Saturday without ever looking competitive.
And so O’Brien’s 18th attempt to win the one race which consistently eludes him bit the dirt – quite literally. Even Frankie Dettori, at the end of his third winless Breeders’ Cup when it has been run at Del Mar, said after his last ride that he had ingested enough grit to last a lifetime.
If the Derby-winning colt brought home anything it was the brutal reality of chucking a brilliant turf horse in the deep end for his first start on this alien surface; imagine stripping off for the shower and walking into a sand blaster. That is what City of Troy faced from the get-go and you can, in photographs, almost see him wincing.
Was it predictable? Well, with hindsight, a lot of people will say yes and US racing aficionados will say “I told you so” but there were a lot of people wiser than me who were also for him before the race.
But the reality was that what happened was a bog-standard example of a European runner on dirt and that, however much practise you can give them in cold blood, as soon as the bell goes the US horses have gone two lengths before our horses realise the gates have opened. Then it is ‘have a bit of that’ and a gritty dirt pie of sharp sand hits them in the eye. It is so different, like a boxer being chucked in a cage fight expecting Queensbury Rules to be observed.
You should, however, not see this as a failure. His mere presence in the race, Coolmore’s and O’Brien’s spirit of adventure with their best horse, added an element of intrigue, interest and hype to the 41st Breeders Cup which I have not seen since Zenyatta, hitherto unbeaten, went to the Classic at Churchill Downs in 2010 for her 21st and last start. Racing in Britain and the US needs more of that.
In O’Brien’s eyes, despite having bombed out in his shot at greater glory, City of Troy remains the best horse he has trained. The cynical view would be: until the next one. He is probably a better than average Derby winner but few horses’ ears will ever have burned as much in the build up to a race.
It is hard to feel sorry for Coolmore. They had two Group One winners on Friday at Del Mar, one in Australia on Saturday and, irony of ironies, actually won the Classic with Sierra Leone, a proper dirt horse, trained in the US by Chad Brown, a pugnacious New Yorker.
As a surface, turf in America is becoming more popular again because it is consistently a safer surface than dirt. At a lot of tracks it is a 50:50 split of races now. However, US horses were all but wiped out by the Europeans in those races. Canada won another and the only US turf winner was More Than Looks in the Mile.
Ralph Beckett’s outstanding year and burgeoning partnership with Rossa Ryan continued from Longchamp to Del Mar when Starlust won the Turf Sprint and Charlie Apppleby kept up his terrific record at the meeting when Rebel’s Romance took the Turf.
Dan Blacker, the British trainer based in Santa Anita for 12 years, had what should be his life-changing winner when Straight No Chaser won the Dirt Mile for MyRacehorse, a micro-share ownership group. Given that he has 900 owners, it was the most popular winner of the day.
This will not be the last we see of O’Brien in the Classic. One day he will find the right horse, it is just that this time City of Troy was the wrong one.
