Will Irish eyes be smiling after City Of Troy's Classic bid?
AMERICAN DREAM: City Of Troy and Rachel Richardson on the track for morning exercise ahead of the Breeders Cup this week. Pic: Healy Racing
Thirty years before Bing Crosby crooned “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” to an appreciative audience from winner’s circle at the Curragh, he sang a different tune to racegoers in Southern California.
The joyous Kildare celebrations kicked off after Meadow Court, in whom Crosby owned a share, won the 1965 Irish Derby. Three decades earlier Crosby was singing to the customers of the newly-opened Del Mar racetrack near San Diego.
He was among several Hollywood superstars who had invested heavily to bring the course to fruition and Bing needed to fire all the marketing arrows in his quiver to get the turnstiles clicking. The unique selling point for his high-risk business venture was the enduring beauty of the location and he tunefully urged people to make their way to “where the turf meets the surf, down at old Del Mar, take a plane, take a train, take a car.”
He wasn’t wrong. To the south is affluent town of La Jolla and the most expensive residential real estate in America. A few miles north sits Torrey Pines Golf course, occasional venue for the US Open and not much more than a drive and a five iron to the west there are miles of golden Pacific beaches. East lies the leafy hills of Rancho Santa Fe, a town with the second largest disposable income in the country, where Bing Crosby once made his home. This is a nice place to stage a race meeting and Saturday it stages a very nice race meeting indeed, the second day of the 2024 Breeders' Cup festival.
There are nine Group 1 races on the card, each with astronomical prize funds, with the biggest pot of all coming in the in the Classic over 10 furlongs where City Of Troy is the sole European representative. Aidan O’Brien has always contended that City Of Troy is the best horse he has ever trained and to be fair to him, he has handled the odd good one down the years.
Untouchable as a two-year-old last year, he’s been slightly patchier this summer, but his wins in the Epsom Derby and Juddmonte Stakes at York in August were both visually powerful performances. At York he broke the track record when beating subsequent Arc winner Bluestocking by over eight lengths into fourth, so the formbook and clock both support the optics of his brilliance that day.
O’Brien immediately announced that the colt would have one more career run and that it would be at Del Mar in November, where City Of Troy would ski ‘off-piste’ and take on world’s finest middle-distance horses on an unfamiliar dirt surface.
Apart from the prize fund of $7m, there are several good reasons to roll the dice. Firstly, it is an incredibly difficult race for horses trained outside the USA to win and a victory would significantly enhance City Of Troy’s reputation. Even more importantly for Coolmore, victory would greatly increase his stallion value in America, being a son of the unbeaten Triple Crown winner Justify.
Since its inception 40 years ago only two Europeans have won the Classic, Arcanques in 1993 for Andre Fabre and Ravens Pass for John Gosden in 2006 and there are solid reasons why this is so. The race comes very late in the European season, in an unfamiliar climate on a surface that few raiders ever experience. The best American horses are in opposition and then there is the sheer elbows-out, argy-bargy nature of American racing, where they go all out from the start, and this can often be a traumatic experience for overseas challengers.
City Of Troy has been precisely prepared to meet these challenges, but can he make history on Saturday night? Aidan O’Brien, who has saddled three placed horses in the Classic, including the ultra-competitive Giant’s Causeway, believes so. “He was a horse we always dreamed that maybe could be very competitive in the Breeders’ Cup Classic. Obviously, we never won it before, but we were placed with some very good horses. And so, we always thought this horse was kind of like Giant’s Causeway, but just with a little bit more class.”
Disappointingly, City Of Troy is one of only half-a-dozen Irish runners on Saturday night and just one of the others is not trained by Aidan O’Brien. His son Donnacha saddles the multiple Group 1 filly Porta Fortuna in an intriguing edition of the mile race on turf. She is opposed principally by the English Guineas winner, Notable Speech and Ballydoyle's improving colt, Diego Valasquez who seems to be getting his act together at last and won a valuable Group 2 handily at Leopardstown last time out.
But in truth, although that mile race would justifiably headline any global racecard, it is merely a support act to the main event, the Classic. This is senior hurling championship at its finest and happily, the race is off at the very television viewer-friendly time of 9.41. Hopefully a large audience can be tempted to bridge that awkward Saturday night gap between ‘Strictly’ and ‘Match of the Day’ and tune in to a horse race that may have a future in equine folklore, where the ghost of Bing Crosby will sing the soundtrack.
The second verse of his promotional ditty goes: “There is a smile on every face and a winner in each race, where the turf meets the surf at Del Mar.”
If City Of Troy gets the job done a reprise of ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ might also make the playlist too.
