Irish master trainer Aidan O’Brien will look to cap his European season with a hat-trick of wins from three exceptional fillies at British racing’s showpiece event Champions Day at Ascot today.
Leading the charge for the 46-year-old — who has an extraordinary 20 Group One victories to his credit this season and a career total of 295 — will be Found, who only a fortnight ago led home an unprecedented 1-2-3 for O’Brien in Europe’s most prestigious race the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
Found, who ended a frustrating run of runners-up spots in Group One races this term with the Arc triumph, will take on a daunting field in the Champion Stakes including French favourite Almanzor, who beat her into second in the Irish Champion Stakes a month ago.
“Found likes a nice clear-run race and doesn’t run over a mile and a half (the Arc distance, the Champion Stakes is 1 1/4miles) very often,” O’Brien told UK Racing this week.
“She’s a Group One winner over a mile, a mile and a quarter and a mile and a half. She’s a really special mare,” added O’Brien, who is due to be crowned not only Irish champion trainer but also British champion handler for the first time since 2008.
Almanzor’s trainer Jean-Claude Rouget said that he wasn’t concerned the great filly would re-oppose his stable star and was extremely happy with how he’d prepared for the race which will see the winner pick up the princely sum of nearly £750,000.
“He’s been in really good form since the Irish Champion Stakes, and I’m extremely happy with him,” Rouget told the Racing Post.
“The other runners in the race don’t interest me. I like to concentrate on my own horse being at the top of his game, which is the most important.
“He’s a very laid back individual, who is a lovely looking horse with a fantastic turn of foot, which should serve us very well. He’ll also like the forecast good ground conditions.”
Perhaps the one that could upset the odds is last year’s Irish Derby winner Jack Hobbs, who makes his return after six months out with a stress fracture of the pelvis.
“It’s a particularly easy race to have him come back in!” trainer John Gosden joked to the Racing Post.
“The field is not only deep but very strong. I don’t think we are under any illusions.
“He’s in great order and is not the type to be ring-rusty,” added the 65-year-old Englishman, whose runner finished third in last year’s renewal.
O’Brien saddles another tough as teak filly in two-time classic champion Minding — winner of the English 1000 Guineas and the English Oaks this term — for the mile race the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes.
She faces 12 rivals including English 2000 Guineas winner Galileo Gold, who will have the effervescent Frankie Dettori on board, and Irish 2000 Guineas victor Awtaad trained by veteran Kevin Prendergast.
“I’m really confident he’s going to go to Ascot at the peak of his powers,” Galileo Gold’s trainer Hugo Palmer told The Guardian.
“People always think of horses like humans, that what they really want to do is lie on a beach and recharge their batteries for a fortnight. He doesn’t have a desire to sit down with an improving book. He’s a racehorse.”
Palmer will also oppose O’Brien in the British Champions Fillies and Mares Group One with the former fielding Architecture — second to Minding in the English Oaks — and the latter Seventh Heaven, who won the Irish Oaks beating the English filly by just over two lengths.
O’Brien, whose son Joseph the former jockey has also taken up training with some success this year, thinks a lot of Seventh Heaven.
“She’s a beautiful traveler and is a massive, rangy filly that handles fast ground very well. I’d say she’s going to make a real four-year-old, because she’s big and rangy.”