Content becomes Galileo's hundredth Group 1 winner

By John Ingles

Horse Racing

Sun August 25, 2024 · 3M ago

Content's Yorkshire Oaks victory ended Galileo's year-long wait for his hundredth individual Group/Grade 1 winner.

It's been a long wait - exactly a year in fact - but Galileo finally reached his century of individual Group/Grade 1 winners when his three-year-old daughter Content stayed on to win the Yorkshire Oaks (replay below), turning the tables on You Got To Me, the filly who'd prevented that landmark being reached a month sooner in the Irish Oaks.

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It was Warm Heart’s victory in the Yorkshire Oaks last August which took Galileo’s total of top-flight Flat winners to 99 and for good measure he was also the sire of both placed horses, Free Wind and Savethelastdance, as well. Warm Heart went on to win the Prix Vermeille, along with the Pegasus World Cup Turf early this year, but for 12 months Galileo’s hundredth Group/Grade 1 winner had remained elusive.

Galileo’s first crop, foaled in 2003, comprised four Group/Grade 1 winners, with the Dermot Weld-trained filly Nightime getting him off the mark at that level in the 2006 Irish 1000 Guineas. Later that year, Sixties Icon became Galileo’s first English classic winner in the St Leger, while Red Rocks (Breeders’ Cup Turf and Man o’War Stakes) and Allegretto (Prix Royal-Oak) were his other Group/Grade 1 winners from his first crop.

Every one of Galileo’s next seventeen crops – up to 2020 – contained a minimum of two Group/Grade 1 winners and, if you include the Irish St Leger, there was at least one English or Irish classic winner in every one of them. His most successful crop was the one foaled in 2008 which comprised nine future Group/Grade 1 winners, among them Frankel.

As well as Nightime’s Irish 1000 Guineas, the Curragh, where Galileo was successful himself in the Irish Derby, has been the scene of some other landmark successes in his stallion career. When Flag of Honour won the Irish St Leger in 2018, he became Galileo’s 73rd top-level winner, equalling the total achieved by his sire Sadler’s Wells, and when Peaceful won the Irish 1000 Guineas in 2020, she was her sire’s 85th Group/Grade 1 winner worldwide, breaking the previous record held by Danehill.

Besides Warm Heart’s win in Florida in January, Galileo’s only other top-flight winner on the Flat previously this year was six-year-old Kyprios who was back to his high-class best to win both the Gold Cup and Goodwood Cup for a second time.

Content is one of only six different three-year-olds to have represented Galileo in Group 1 races so far this year. Another who had gone close to bringing up the century previously this summer was Illinois, beaten two lengths into second in the Grand Prix de Paris.

Galileo has a potentially very strong hand in next month's St Leger as, besides Queen's Vase winner Illinois (a close second in the Great Voltigeur earlier this week), he could also be represented by Grosvenor Square, recent wide-margin winner of the Irish St Leger Trial, and Jan Brueghel who kept his unbeaten record when successful in the Gordon Stakes at Goodwood. Galileo, who died at the age of 23 in July 2021, therefore has a good chance of maintaining that record of having at least one classic winner in each of his crops.

Content wasn’t beaten far in fourth in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf on her first attempt to become her sire’s hundredth top-flight winner and while she failed to land a blow in her first two starts this year over a mile, in the Poule d’Essai des Pouliches and Coronation Stakes, she then finished well for third behind Bluestocking in the Pretty Polly Stakes before faring best of Galileo's three runners in the Irish Oaks when keeping on behind You Got To Me.

Galileo's daughters have a fine record in the Yorkshire Oaks, and Content was following Lush Lashes, Tapestry, Seventh Heaven and Love, as well as Warm Heart, in winning it, all of those bar Lush Lashes (trained by Jim Bolger) being successful for Ballydoyle. Among Galileo's granddaughters to have won the Yorkshire Oaks are Enable and Alpinista, both of them also Arc winners of course.

Content's dam was no stranger to success on the Knavesmire either, and while she's out of dual Nunthorpe winner Mecca’s Angel, like a lot of Galileo’s offspring out of speedy mares it’s her sire’s stamina that has won through.

Previously this year, it had been her younger sibling Bedtime Story, by Frankel, Timeform's highest-rated two-year-old of either sex at present and entered in Saturday's Debutante Stakes at the Curragh, who has made more headlines, especially when running away with the Chesham Stakes, but Content is assured now of a permanent place in the story of her remarkable sire.

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