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“So please tell us which of Aidan’s horses would not have deserved to run had they not been trained and/or owned by Ballydoyle, Gladiateur?”
You put forward a very good- and correct- argument for each of Ballydoyle’s representatives this season.
I suppose my major gripe is that a “proper” trainer- like the ones from yesteryear to which you allude- would know who his best horse is. Sure, he might have a more late-developing improver as a second string to his bow, but he wouldn’t run a handful in the hope that one of them strikes the jackpot.
There’s no way of proving it, of course, as they are both no longer with us but I strongly disagree with your hypothesis that Cecil or Hern would have fielded more runners.
In fact, I can picture the Major’s reaction to that proposal quite vividly; Henry might have been a tad more diplomatic.
Monopolies in sport happen all the time though. Uniteds monopoly is over in football now and someone else has taken over, it might/probably will happen with coolmore. AOB keeps saying they’re all pinching themselves at how lucky the family is to be in the situation they are now. There is something missing with the derby but for me that’s more down to the current society than anything wrong with horse racing itself. People should look first and foremost at the horses anyway. When I first went to the derby I didn’t even know which horse was trained by who. It was 15 horses all running against each other. It’s (in general situations) still the first thing I look for now. The horse. Horse’s form, horse’s breeding, then even sometimes the horses name and what it looks like. People that really love horse racing should look at the horse. There were 13 runners on Saturday. Long term it’s not great for the sport to have all the best horses in a small amount of yards for sure, but does it really matter that much in the actual race who the horses are trained by? What an exciting race it was in the end as well.
Even at Royal Ascot it doesn’t matter. Of course then you start to look much more at trainers/owners because the cream tends to rise to the top. But Royal Ascot for me is an amazing week of top racing arguably the best in the world and it’s in our own country. It’s incredibly exciting and the fact the winners tend to all come from the top yards does not take anything away from it. That’s just normal in sport.
Plus people complaining about AOB having a monopoly in the derby, if he has such a monopoly we should all be winning lots of money if it was so clear and obvious! People complaining so much are probably not backing his horses!!
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