It is hard enough to decide which trainers have been the most successful, never mind the most influential. The history books are littered with names of trainers who have prepared umpteen feature-race winners but who have done nothing to change the course of history.
On the world’s stage, however, one name stands out as regards taking the sport from where it was to where it is now: the late, great Dr. M. V. O’Brien of Ballydoyle, Co. Tipperary, Ireland.
The Ireland into which Vincent O’Brien was born in 1917 was a very different place to the one in which he died in 2009. And he can take some of the credit for that transformation. Politically, Ireland changed massively between the two World Wars. British rule was overthrown, giving birth firstly to the Irish Free State and subsequently to the Irish Republic.
Vincent O'Brien
But many of Ireland’s people found themselves experiencing the truth of old adage that, ‘Come the revolution, things will be different; not better, just different’. Ireland had gained its independence but it remained Great Britain’s poor relation. This applied to racing as much as to any other aspect of society. Vincent O’Brien was the man who did most to change that.
Vincent O’Brien began training on the family farm at Churchtown in Co. Cork in 1944 before establishing his own stable, Ballydoyle, in Co. Tipperary in 1951. From the outset, his vision was not that things would be as they were, but as they could be. And his vision of what they could be was very different to most other people’s ideas.
Although, remarkably, he sent out the winners of the Autumn Double (Irish Cambridgeshire and Irish Cesarewitch) in his first season, Vincent O’Brien concentrated more on jumps racing than Flat in his early years. Right from the start, his targets were the biggest races in England, rather than the biggest ones at home. And he mopped these up, all three of them: he supplied the Cheltenham Gold Cup winner in 1948, ’49, ’50 and ’53; the Champion Hurdle winner in 1948, ’49 and ’50; the Grand National winner (courtesy of three different horses) in 1953, ’54 and ’55.
His re-defining of the possible was not limited merely to his results, but also to his methods. When Hatton’s Grace and Cottage Rake travelled from Churchtown to Cheltenham in March 1949 to win the Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup, they came not by ferry but by aeroplane, which to anyone else would have been unthinkable at the time.
In a decade, Vincent O’Brien had become the most successful National Hunt trainer in the world, but that was only the warm-up act. However good a chef one is, one can’t cook a great meal unless one can afford the best ingredients. Similarly, no trainer, however skilled, can consistently win big races unless he has clients who can afford to buy good horses.
Investing in Irish racing
To conquer the parochial world of National Hunt racing – which effectively meant the British Isles – he had attracted the patronage of successful Irish and British businessmen. To conquer the wider world of Flat racing, O’Brien had to draw his clients from a deeper pool. Making the decision after Quare Times’ Grand National victory in 1955 to concentrate on Flat racing, he was soon attracting unprecedented levels of international investment into Irish racing.
In seemingly the blink of an eye, leading American owners were racing horses from Ballydoyle. O’Brien’s first two Flat champions Ballymoss (GB) (Mossoborough {GB}) and Gladness (Ire) (Sayajirao {GB}) were both owned by John McShain, ‘The Man Who Built Washington’. (He didn’t actually build all of it, just the parts that matter most, such as the Pentagon, the Jefferson Memorial, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the airport; furthermore, his company undertook the reconstruction of the White House between 1949 and ’52).
"In seemingly the blink of an eye, leading American owners were racing horses from Ballydoyle." - John Berry
Ballymoss finished second in the (English) Derby in 1957 before winning the Irish Derby and (English) St Leger, and then was Horse of the Year in 1958 thanks to a string of big wins including the King George, Queen Elizabeth Stakes and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe; while Gladness was the champion stayer of 1958 with wins in the Ascot Gold Cup, Goodwood Cup and Ebor H.
O’Brien’s first four (English) Derby winners were all US-owned. Raymond Guest raced the 1982 winner Larkspur (GB) (Never Say Die {USA}) and the 1969 winner Sir Ivor (USA) (Sir Gaylord {USA}), the latter’s triumph coming during the four-year term which Mr Guest served as the US Ambassador to the Republic of Ireland.
The 1970 Triple Crown hero Nijinsky (Can) (Northern Dancer {Can}) was owned by the American tycoon Charles Engelhard, on whom Ian Fleming based Auric Goldfinger, the eponymous character in the James Bond novel and movie ‘Goldfinger’. Roberto (USA) (Hail To Reason {USA}) won the 1972 Derby for his owner/breeder John Galbreath, the construction magnate who owned the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team and named the colt after the Pirates’ star player Roberto Clemente.
O’Brien’s other American patrons included James Cox Brady, owner of 1965 (English) Oaks winner Long Look (USA) (Ribot {GB}), Alice Du Pont Mills, owner of 1966 (English) 1,000 Guineas winner Glad Rags (GB) (High Hat {GB}), Mrs George Getty II, owner of 1977 Sussex Stakes winner Artaius (USA) (Round Table {USA}) and Diana Guest Manning, owner of 1977 Waterford Crystal Mile winner and subsequent Coolmore-based champion sire Be My Guest (USA) (Northern Dancer {Can}).
"Irish racing was being revolutionised by this unprecedented level of international investment." - John Berry
Irish racing was being revolutionised by this unprecedented level of international investment. Ireland was no longer merely the place where top-class horses and top-class horseman were bred and raised: they could now remain in the country of their birth rather than having to head overseas to realise their true value, notwithstanding that O’Brien’s internationalist outlook prompted him to recruit a series of Australian jockeys with Garnie Bougoure, Pat Glennon and Jack Purtell all retained by him at various points during the 1960s.
Recruiting potential stars
Furthermore, O’Brien was not merely enabling top-class horses to remain in Ireland: he was importing them. He was a pioneer in recruiting potential stars from North American yearling sales. In the pre-internet era his capacity for absorbing and retaining information on foreign bloodlines and form was startling, over and above his peerless judgement of physical potential.
When Charles Engelhard asked him to visit Windfields Farm in Canada in the summer of 1968 to inspect one particularly blue-blooded yearling, O’Brien instead found his eye caught by a different colt in the same field. This turned out to be Nijinsky, a second-crop son of the 1964 Kentucky Derby winner Northern Dancer (Can), a stallion who was, as far as most Europeans were concerned, a complete unknown at the time.
"O’Brien instead found his eye caught by a different colt in the same field. This turned out to be Nijinsky." - John Berry
O’Brien’s next and final major investor was not American but British. Robert Sangster, heir to the Vernons football pools organisation, came on board in the early 1970s. Forming an alliance with O’Brien’s son-in-law John Magnier (the principal of Coolmore Stud) which initially included various other investors such as Danny Schwartz and Simon Fraser, Sangster fronted the masterplan which would see the cream of the Northern Hemisphere’s yearling crops drafted in to Ballydoyle before retiring to stud, in either Kentucky or Ireland, two or three years later.
John Magnier and Robert Sangster
If successful, it would be self-funding, or better; and for a decade it was. Investing heavily in sons of Northern Dancer, the project yielded such stars as the Derby winners The Minstrel (Can) and Golden Fleece (USA); the dual Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe hero Alleged (USA); the subsequent champion sires Caerleon (USA) and Sadler’s Wells (USA); as well as numerous other champions including Thatching (USA), Try My Best (USA), Monteverdi (USA), Storm Bird (USA), Lomond (USA) and El Gran Senor (USA).
Needless to say, the team used the best jockeys: firstly Lester Piggott and then Pat Eddery (whose maternal grandfather Jack Moylan had been O’Brien’s preferred jockey when he started training in the 1940s).
The cost of the yearlings rose each year as the bloodstock market soared. It reached its peak at the Keeneland July Yearling Sale in 1985 when the team (with the late Stavros Niarchos as a partner) bought Seattle Dancer (USA) (Nijinsky {Can}) for US$13.1 million, a record price which still stands. These prices remained justifiable as the stallion market was still booming with colossal syndication values, but it couldn’t go on forever. No bull market ever does. What finally brought the project back down to earth, however, was emergence of the Maktoums as the racing world’s biggest spenders. Nobody, not even when guided by the judgement of Vincent O’Brien, could compete against their determination to buy the choicest lots.
Vincent O'Brien and Lester Piggott
Vincent O’Brien enjoyed his final top-level triumph when Lester Piggott brought Royal Academy (USA) (Nijinsky {Can}) past the post first in the G1 Breeders’ Cup Mile at Belmont Park in 1990, reviving memories of their similarly thrilling success with Sir Ivor in the Washington DC International at Laurel Park 22 years previously. Three years later O’Brien and Piggott (with combined ages of 133) shared a final Royal Ascot curtain call when College Chapel (GB) (Sharpo {GB}) took the G3 Cork And Orrery S. (now G1 Diamond Jubilee S.). To describe that emotional win as the end of an era would have been to underplay the chapters which trainer and jockey had written into the sport’s annals.
Ireland’s economy, both bloodstock-related and general, would, of course, have flourished in the second half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st even without Vincent O’Brien’s contribution. The world would have become a smaller place anyway thanks to improved travel and the internet, even without Vincent O’Brien being decades ahead of his time as regards the internationalisation of the sport. The Northern Dancer sire-line would possibly have changed the face of the bloodstock world somehow or other even without Vincent O’Brien’s assistance. But it would be wrong to underestimate the part which he played in any aspect of these changes.
"It would be wrong to underestimate the part which he played in any aspect of these changes." - John Berry
Trainer of 16 British and 27 Irish Classic winners, Vincent O’Brien remains the only non-GB-based trainer ever to have been Champion Trainer of Great Britain both on the Flat and over jumps, over and above his 13 Irish premierships. In 2003 he was voted the greatest influence in horse racing history in a worldwide poll hosted by the Racing Post. Under John Magnier’s direction Ballydoyle continues to thrive as the base for perennial champion trainer Aidan O’Brien (no relation). By any standards, Vincent O’Brien (who in 1983 was awarded an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland in recognition of his achievements) was one of the most successful trainers in history. More than that, though, he was surely the most influential.
Don’t miss tomorrow’s TDN AusNZ. Bren O’Brien will share his thoughts on a legend of the Australian turf.
