Kyprios becomes Ballydoyle's most prolific Group 1 winner

When Auguste Rodin won the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot in June he provided his trainer Aidan O’Brien with the 400th Group/Grade 1 success of his career worldwide on the Flat. Of course, that milestone is already rapidly receding into the distance now as O’Brien forges on towards the 500 mark, having bagged another three Group 1 successes last weekend at Longchamp alone.

Auguste Rodin has himself contributed six top-level victories to that phenomenal total in his career to date. Besides the Futurity Trophy at two, he won the Derby, Irish Derby, Irish Champion Stakes and Breeders’ Cup Turf last season and was only a neck away from a seventh Group/Grade 1 success when bidding to win the Irish Champion Stakes again last month.

Had he done so, he would have joined a handful of other Ballydoyle greats to have won seven times at the highest level. But one of those recent Longchamp winners went one better, becoming O’Brien’s most prolific Group 1 winner of all when notching an eighth victory at that level in the Prix du Cadran.

High-class stayer Kyprios has won all six of his races this season, including the Gold Cup, Goodwood Cup and Irish St Leger besides the Cadran, and if that sounds familiar it’s because he enjoyed an identical season of success in Europe’s top staying races in 2022. What makes Kyprios’s record all the more remarkable is that sandwiched between the two campaigns when he has been utterly dominant was his injury-hit season last year.

Early in 2023 Kyprios had sustained an injury to a fetlock joint which then became badly infected. Speaking at Royal Ascot this year after Kyprios had won back his Gold Cup title, his trainer said: "It’s a million to one, it’s almost impossible to come back from what he came back from. At one stage, we weren’t sure that he would live, but then he came back, we had to teach him how to walk and get him on a treadmill."

Kyprios did make it to the track last year, twice, finishing second in both the Irish St Leger and Long Distance Cup on his belated return in the autumn.

But it begs the question what his Group 1 tally would now be had he not suffered such a serious setback. His eighth Group 1 success moves Kyprios ahead of five former Ballydoyle residents who all won seven such races.

The first to do so was top-class miler Rock of Gibraltar who not only won seven Group 1 races but won them consecutively, becoming the first horse to achieve that feat in the European Pattern. After ending his two-year-old campaign with wins in the Grand Criterium and Dewhurst Stakes, Rock of Gibraltar maintained his sequence at three with wins in the 2000 Guineas, Irish 2000 Guineas, St James’s Palace Stakes, Sussex Stakes and Prix du Moulin. His winning streak came to an end on his final start in the Breeders’ Cup Mile when running on strongly for second behind French colt Domedriver.

Two mares feature in the list, with both Minding and Magical being by Kyprios’s sire Galileo. Minding was another classic winner who’d gained her first Group 1 successes at two. Having won the Moyglare Stud Stakes and Fillies’ Mile, she went on to win the 1000 Guineas and Oaks at three before dropping back in trip for wins in the Pretty Polly Stakes, Nassau Stakes and Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, showing her versatility with a career-best effort dropped back to a mile. Minding would almost certainly have gone on to further Group 1 success at four but was retired after sustaining an injury following a successful reappearance in the Mooresbridge Stakes.

Magical was a later-developing filly, not registering her first Group 1 success until the autumn of her three-year-old season when winning the Fillies & Mares Stakes at Ascot. She was unfortunate to be a contemporary of top-class mare Enable (herself an eleven-time Group 1 winner) who beat her into second in the Breeders’ Cup Turf later at three and again in the following season’s Eclipse and Yorkshire Oaks. But the tough and genuine Magical was found further opportunities for Group 1 success at four and five, winning two editions of both the Tattersalls Gold Cup and Irish Champion Stakes, as well as successes in the Pretty Polly Stakes and Champion Stakes.

Another by Galileo, Highland Reel, clocked up the most airmiles of any of Ballydoyle’s most prolific Group/Grade 1 winners. When he retired to stud after winning his final start, the 2017 Hong Kong Vase (a race he’d also won two years earlier as a three-year-old), he did so with record earnings for a European-trained horse. Also successful at three in the Secretariat Stakes at Arlington, Highland Reel went on to win the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes and Breeders’ Cup Turf at four and the Coronation Cup and Prince of Wales’s Stakes at five before that final win in Hong Kong.

O’Brien’s other seven-time Group 1 winner was Yeats who, like Kyprios, found his niche as a high-class and durable stayer. He too was no stranger to injury, missing the Derby and indeed the whole of the rest of his three-year-old season after keeping his unbeaten record by winning the Derrinstown Stud Derby Trial. When he returned at four he won the Coronation Cup but subsequent seasons revealed him to be a thorough stayer. From the ages of five to eight he became the only four-time winner of the Gold Cup and for three different jockeys – Kieren Fallon, Mick Kinane and Johnny Murtagh who was in the saddle for his last two Gold Cups.

Yeats wasn’t quite as dominant in the staying division as Kyprios currently is. He was beaten in all three of his attempts in the Prix du Cadran, for example, though he did win Longchamp’s other Group 1 staying contest the Prix Royal-Oak. He ran in the Irish St Leger four times but his only win in it came as a six-year-old on the good to firm ground which probably suited him best.

But in clocking up his eight Group 1 wins, Kyprios has an advantage which Yeats lacked in his day. The Goodwood Cup didn’t become a Group 1 until 2017, well after Yeats gained his two victories on the only two occasions he contested the race in 2006 and 2008.

The arrival of Kyprios on the staying scene as a four-year-old in 2022 coincided with the final season, at the age of eight, of that other famously prolific stayer of recent seasons Stradivarius, who finished third to Kyprios at Royal Ascot and then a neck second to him at Goodwood on the last two starts of his tremendous career.

Stradivarius retired as the winner of a record 18 pattern races, though ‘only’ seven of those – four Goodwood Cups and three Gold Cups – were Group 1 contests. Stradivarius finished second in his only bid to win the Cadran in 2021, the winner that year (and again in the absence of Kyprios in 2023) being Trueshan who was runner-up to Kyprios in the same race at Longchamp last Saturday.

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