Blast From The Past: Irish Oaks

Aidan O’Brien might be the most dominant trainer in Ireland’s classics this century but it’s still Sir Michael Stoute who has trained more winners of the Irish Oaks than anyone else. His score stands at six to O’Brien’s four.

Stoute’s first winner, Fair Salinia in 1978, was awarded the race, while his other successful fillies include Melodist who dead-heated ten years later, but there was no arguing with the last of his sextet, Petrushka, who was one of the best winners of the race in recent decades.

Petrushka’s performance at the Curragh was a marked improvement on her showing in the two classics she’d contested at home. She failed to threaten in either the 1000 Guineas or the Oaks, scrambling into the frame late on in both races. At Newmarket, where she started the 6/4 favourite, she finished third to Lahan and at Epsom she took fourth behind Love Divine.

The Oaks winner was not among Petrushka’s Curragh rivals, but the two fillies who were placed at Epsom, Kalypso Katie and Melikah, were in the ten-strong line-up. Also in the Irish Oaks field were the first two home in the Ribblesdale Stakes, Miletrian and Teggiano, while the Irish 1000 Guineas runner-up Amethyst represented Aidan O’Brien. It was Godolphin’s Melikah who started favourite at 2/1 after shaping well at Epsom, with Kalypso Katie and Petrushka next in the betting at 5/2 and 11/2.

After her previous classic disappointments ‘it was a pleasure to have the real Petrushka revealed in all her glory’ remarked Racehorses. ‘When long-time leader Littlepacepaddocks drifted off the rail two furlongs out, Petrushka took up the invitation and almost immediately put distance between herself and a thoroughly representative field…It was one of those races which takes little description – Petrushka was in a league apart on the day.’

At the line, Petrushka had drawn five and a half lengths clear under Johnny Murtagh who was completing an Irish Derby/Oaks after Sinndar’s success weeks earlier. Melikah took second, while the Cheshire Oaks runner-up Inforapenny outran her odds of 100/1 to finish third.

The Irish Oaks was the first of three Group 1 wins for Petrushka that season which established her as the top three-year-old filly of the year in Britain and Ireland. Her chief rival to that title was her Epsom conqueror Love Divine, though when they met for a second time in the Yorkshire Oaks Petrushka came out on top by a length and a quarter. Petrushka’s hat-trick was completed in the Prix de l’Opera at Longchamp but she was unable to end the season on a winning note when a below-form fifth in the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf.

After sustaining a tendon injury in the Coronation Cup on her only start at four, Petrushka was bought privately (reportedly for more than five million dollars) by Darley Stud. She has yet to produce anything as good as herself as a broodmare – her best foal to date, in fact, is smart hurdler Parlour Games, runner-up at the 2015 Cheltenham Festival.