Champions Weekend has been built and it only remains to be seen if they will come. But what can already be said ahead of kick-off at Leopardstown today is that if a €3.7 million programme in perfect weather, and featuring a genuine superstar in Australia, isn't enough to pull the Irish public to flat racing's field of dreams then it's hard to know what can.
Quality-wise it hardly gets better than what’s on offer today and at the Curragh tomorrow. The last five Group One prizes of the season have been shoe-horned into a single weekend that some view as perhaps the most important in modern Irish racing history.
There is an international shop-window element to it but in purely parochial terms if Ireland’s racing public are unable to park their famous partiality towards the National Hunt game for long enough to try this weekend’s elite action for size it will be hard to avoid the conclusion that the quality of action on track in this country is largely irrelevant to the job of getting bums on seats.
It might not be ideal that Australia’s apparent dominance over his rivals in the €1 million Qipco Irish Champion Stakes is such that one bookmaking firm has already paid out but this is still rarefied stuff. Australia’s reputation is such that four other Group One winners are reduced to “extra” status even though The Grey Gatsby’s €75,000 supplementary means a clash of classics winners that was once the Irish Derby’s preserve.
With the Coolmore Matron Stakes also up for grabs as well as a Group
Two and a pair of Group Threes, projections for an 11,000-strong crowd today hardly look wildly ambitious considering the quality of what’s on offer. This is flat racing in Ireland at its best, so perhaps the potential for Aidan O’Brien’s Ballydoyle behemoth to dominate both today and tomorrow’s action is only an accurate reflection of reality.
Australia heads a team of 16 O’Brien runners today alone. The champion trainer has 15 at the Curragh tomorrow and has the favourite for four of the five Group One prizes. Even in such rare company though, Australia stands out.
It is a year to the day since he was proclaimed by O’Brien as the best he’s had and a 2,000 Guineas blip apart, the regally-bred colt has done everything he can to justify such an exalted claim. Two Derbies and an authoritative York defeat of The Great Gatsby and Mukhadram indicate that 10 furlongs on quick ground is perfect for Australia and he gets that here.
Ryan Moore is making a dash from Doncaster's St Leger to south Dublin but even having Britain's top jockey aboard doesn't dilute the task The Grey Gatsby looks to have in reversing that York form, something trainer Kevin Ryan acknowledges: "Australia got first run on us at York, but I'm still not sure we'd have beaten him."
Rizeena has finished ahead of Tapestry on the three occasions the fillies have met and Tapestry faces a big task dropping back to the Matron Stakes mile after landing the Yorkshire Oaks at a mile-and-a-half.But Ballydoyle’s hope is in the form of her life.
Free Eagle goes in the Enterprise Stakes where Prince Of All, on his first start for Sheikh Hamdan, can initiate a double for the owner who also has Jersey winner Mustajeeb in the Group Two Boomerang Stakes.
