Jamie Lynch: The Stoute pedigree back in fashion

A tribulation is never far from a trial, and the trials are the top of the racing agenda right now, in the season within the season when horses are picked and orders are pecked. We’re always looking for a Leicester, that nonconformist horse grazing in the left-field who can challenge the classic establishment, but equally there’s something comforting about the same old names playing the same old games.

Take the fillies, for example. The Hugh Hefners of training, Aidan O’Brien and John Gosden, are at it again this year, hoarding the glamour girls, to the extent that, between them, they have the first eight in the Oaks betting. Gosden has played the perfect hand, pinching the pocket of the boys with So Mi Dar (Timeform 104p) in the Derby Trial at Epsom bringing a big gun to a knife fight at Newmarket, in the Pretty Polly massacre, where Swiss Range ran amok and ran to 113 (with a p), so mean and keen that the shorter Oaks of the French version is Plan ‘A’ as things stand, though Golden Horn stood in the same spot last year, and the rest was rewritten history.

Gosden has a pair of Queens but O’Brien copped for a full house at Newmarket, a classic 1-2-3, spearheaded by the monstrous Minding (122), whose only Oaks crime was being a bit too good, too good to be as good over a good bit further at Epsom? More of that in the weeks to come, but if Minding is laid bare after such a full-on performance in the Guineas, we’re only scratching the surface with Somehow (103P), whose beauty-free brushstroke at Chester distorts the bigger, bolder, multi-coloured picture, green-ladened and animated by blue, the blue blood of her Oaks-winning dam.

But there are other forces at work as far as the colts go, including a familiar force and source with a different projection and direction.

Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. It’s all in Midterm (112p), and all about his trainer. The something old is the Sir Michael Stoute tradition, the renowned academy that has needed a few Ofsted reminders about standards in recent years, but the something new is the focus this season, an apparent redoubling of efforts to get the stable back to what is was and put it back to where it was, amongst the global elite.

And then to Midterm, where the something borrowed is the Galileo gene, matched with the Juddmonte DNA as gloriously happened before with Frankel, and the something blue is Midterm’s price on Oddschecker, all the more so after US Army Ranger’s scramble in the Chester Vase.  

To highlight the sleeves-up, head-down approach of the Stoute yard this year, like a semi-sleeping giant rousing and resolving to once again rule the land, have a look at this graphic, analysing the same spring period over the last four seasons:

More runners, more winners and more thrivers tell the tale of a switched-on stable, certainly compared to recent years; and the data encompasses only the first day of the Chester meeting, not including Thursday’s Group 3 winner Cannock Chase, who’s the embodiment of the revolution. We know him well, yet there was something different about Cannock Chase in the Huxley. We think we know the Stoute stable well, yet there’s something different about it this year.

For nine-tenths of the Chester Vase, US Army Ranger did indeed look the real deal, but whether it was immaturity or inability, his final furlong won’t give Midterm any sleepless nights, while Stoute himself must now be sleeping well because his stable no longer is.

Midterm’s path is clear, all the way to the Derby, via the Dante, and the reason he’s in the fast lane on the magical motorway to Epsom is all because the stable has turned a significant corner, past glories in the rear-view mirror but new ones in plain sight.

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It wasn’t quite the same, and there may never be another like him, but Kingman did a fair job of filling the Frankel void for a while there, albeit like that time John Humphries deputised on Question Time after David Dimbleby was sparked out by his wife’s bullock. And so to America, where the gold chain with the American Pharoah inscription hangs heavy around the neck of Nyquist, the clear favourite for the Kentucky Derby on Saturday and the one around which Triple Crown II hopes revolve.

Nothing has beaten Nyquist, his seven-race career encompassing the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile and two warm-up runs this year, the latest a supposed showdown with Mohaymen, a showdown in which Nyquist showed up and made all and Mohaymen downed tools. That was the Florida Derby, the same race Barbaro and Big Brown took on their way to Churchill glory in recent years, and Nyquist is in pole position in all regards bar perhaps the draw, though 13 is lucky for some.

A similar price for the Kentucky Oaks, though probably deserving to be shorter, is Rachel’s Valentina, daughter of the great Rachel Alexandra. Songbird would have been odds-on or thereabouts had she not suffered injury, but her loss is Valentina’s gain, best of the rest when Songbird lit up the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies.

Rachel’s Valentina was second again in her prep run, but that doesn’t tell the full story, winning the battle against Cathryn Sophia but losing the war, and she’s a good bet to follow in her illustrious dam’s hoofprints by winning the Oaks.

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And now for the second Question Time reference. If you’re reading this on Thursday, then watch it, and if not then I suspect you’ll hear about it soon enough.

We all enjoy it when a racing ambassador does something different on TV, like Mick FitzGerald on Mastermind or Frankie Dettori presenting Top of The Pops. But you may need to fasten your seatbelt for this one.

He may not exactly be a racing personality, but he’s definitely a personality in racing, and Michael O’Leary has a well-earned reputation for telling it how it is, in and out of racing, making for a would-be dynamite panellist in a political and politically-sensitive environment.

For a flavour of what could happen, I’ll leave you with this, one of his tastier quotes:

‘The chattering bloody classes, or what I call the liberal Guardian readers, they’re all buying SUVs to drive around London. I smile at these loons who drive their SUVs down to Sainsbury’s and buy kiwi fruit from New Zealand. They’re flown in from New Zealand for Christ sakes. They’re the equivalent of environmental nuclear bombs!’