Shock news: not all opposition was swept aside by the record-breaking Ballydoyle stable of Ireland’s champion trainer Aidan O’Brien last year.
The County Tipperary centre of horseracing excellence might have secured a new global best of 28 Group One Flat-race wins but they suffered a serious defeat on the sporting stage.
It is fair to say the victor was pretty pleased with the result when the Ballydoyle staff team of Aidan met son Joseph’s team on the football pitch.
Joseph O’Brien with Derek O’Connor after Edwulf held off Outlander to win the Irish Gold Cup
‘Guess the score,’ Joseph O’Brien says with a wide smile on his face. ‘7-1 to the boys on the hill! Dad was the ref. He blew the whistle twice, at half-time and full-time. He kept telling the lads to go in harder!’
The ‘boys on the hill’ are the staff Joseph, scorer of one of those goals, has assembled at his County Kilkenny stable carved out of the side of Owning Hill.
With a gallop that snakes up the hillside and rises 340 feet, the yard was created and first used by Joseph’s grandfather, farmer-turned-trainer Joe Crowley.
It was here that Aidan first started to make his name training jumpers such as Urubande, 1996 winner of the race now known as the Ballymore Novices’ Hurdle, before being lured to Ballydoyle.
Now it is where Joseph has started a training career with the same authority as his stable’s goal- scoring performance.
At 24, when many of his age are leaving university and submitting applications for their first jobs, Joseph is supervising 150 horses, split 50-50 Flat and jumps.
O’Brien has a chance of pulling off arguably his most remarkable feat yet with Edwulf
He has won a Group One two-year-old race on the flat and a Grade One race over both hurdles and fences — while the highlight has to be landing the £2.25million Melbourne Cup with Rekindling in November. What started in June 2016 with a remarkable four winners on his first day is phase two of his working life.
It follows the riding career which lasted into a seventh season and yielded two Derby winners, Camelot (2012) and Australia (2014), and two Irish championships before the unequal battle between his physique and the weighing scales was conceded.
Joseph always knew his time as a jockey would be short and always had his eye on training.
At this week’s Cheltenham Festival, he has a chance of pulling off arguably his most remarkable feat yet, with Irish Gold Cup winner Edwulf.
The JP McManus-owned nine-year-old, who will be ridden by crack amateur jockey Derek O’Connor, is a 20-1 shot to win the £625,000 Timico Cheltenham Gold Cup on Friday.
The odds about the son of Kayf Tara even running again would have been much, much longer after Edwulf collapsed after crashing through the final fence of the National Hunt Chase last year.
Joseph says: ‘I was down at the last fence. I thought he was going to be second but he made a mistake at the second last. He then galloped through the last fence.
‘It was quite unbelievable. He was down for about an hour. They had to delay the last race.
‘I thought he was having a heart attack. If it was that, he was in trouble. But the vets wanted to give him as much chance as they could. From what I can gather, he basically ran out of oxygen. His heart sent the oxygen to his vital organs to keep himself alive. He had some kind of neurological episode.’
Edwulf was even diagnosed with temporary blindness but bounced back to health remarkably quickly, so much so that after a summer rehabilitation at McManus’s Martinstown Stud, the gelding returned to O’Brien to race again.
After being pulled up on his first run at Leopardstown’s Christmas meeting, Edwulf could be backed at 100-1 on the morning of the Irish Gold Cup back at the track on February 4. He stayed on resolutely to win by a neck at odds of 33-1.
Joseph insists he has never had concerns about running Edwulf again. He says: ‘It is just a testament to the horse and his attitude. He had a couple of schooling races and we did not leave any stone unturned.
‘All the vets said the likelihood of it happening to him again were no higher than it happening to any horse. He pulled up at Christmas but he actually ran well. He sharpened up nicely at home from that and went to Leopardstown again.’
O’Brien is too young to remember when his father landed three Champion Hurdles with Istabraq. His first taste of the Festival came when riding Shield, trained by his father and owned by his mother Annemarie, to finish unplaced in the 2013 Champion Bumper.
Three years later, Ivanovich Gorbatov won the Triumph Hurdle, a success officially credited to Aidan but acknowledged as being down to the work of Joseph, who was still waiting to be granted his trainer’s licence.
Ivanovich Gorbatov will be back this week for a crack at Friday’s County Hurdle. Stablemates joining him could also include Early Doors (Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys Handicap Hurdle), Rhinestone (Champion Bumper) and Tower Bridge (Ballymore Novices’ Hurdle).
Joseph will be hoping he is fielding another winning team, with Edwulf as his centre-forward.