Aidan O'Brien, whose rise to the top of his profession has been spectacular and swift, had the Irish flags waving in triumph as Johannesburg pounded home through the dirt ahead of Repent and Siphonic in Saturday's Breeders' Cup Juvenile at Belmont Park.
O'Brien and stable jockey Michael Kinane were breaking their Breeders' Cup duck with the 7 to 1 shot who simply annihilated the best the US had to offer. The combination also finished second with the luckless Milan in the Breeders' Turf and for good measure took third spot in the Mile with Bach.
O'Brien and Kinane had total faith in their three-time Group One winner on turf in Europe and he repaid them by taking to the dirt like a natural and defying doubters who feared the extended one-mile trip would be his downfall.
He was always travelling strongly and quickened round the outside of the field to lead inside the final furlong for a comfortable length-and-a-quarter win over Repent, to cheers from a large Irish contingent who were celebrating their country's third win at this meeting - each gained at Belmont (Royal Academy and Ridgewood Pearl). The highly-touted home challenger Officer came home fifth.
Kinane, scoring his first Cup win at the 16th attempt, said of Johannesburg: "He has been a champion every step of the way through the year. We always thought he was made for the dirt and he's proved it today.
"I told Aidan a fair while ago that this was his dirt horse and he was loving the surface and getting a good grip of it right from the word go.
"Coming to a place like this your hopes and dreams can turn into reality and that's what happened." O'Brien, who was gaining his 22nd Group or Grade One win of the year but had saddled 10 previous Cup losers, added: "He was a natural horse from day one with tremendous natural ability."
Johannesburg is now 3 to 1 favourite for next year's Kentucky Derby with Ladbrokes, who quote him at 2 to 1 "with a run" for the 2,000 Guineas.
Part-owner Michael Tabor said: "Plans are plentiful. He could go for the English Guineas or the Kentucky Derby - I have to sit down and discuss it with John Magnier."
The first time Chris McCarron felt the surge of Tiznow's power, the contestants for the Breeders' Cup Classic were parading quietly in front of the vast Belmont Park grandstand, each horse and rider squired by a purple-jacketed attendant on a pony.
Tiznow had been behaving skittishly all week, and now, sensing his impatience, McCarron told the pony-boy to let them canter past their rivals to the far end of the home straight, where they turned and made their way back to the starting gate.
Ten minutes later, as the 13 horses streamed round the turn in a blur of speed and colour, McCarron felt that surge again. He was running second, behind Jorge Chavez on Albert the Great, the local favourite, when Frankie Dettori pushed Sakhee up alongside Tiznow. "When Sakhee got to my hip," McCarron said on Saturday night, "Tiznow saw him before I did. I felt the acceleration and I was like, 'Oh boy. Good. Now we're going to start running'."
At that point Dettori was beginning to believe he had the race in his pocket. Half an hour earlier he had taken Fantastic Light to victory in the Breeders' Cup Turf, in a course record. Now the six-lengths winner of the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe was responding to his instructions, and the Godolphin Stables' decision to split Sheikh Mohammed's Fantastic Light and Sheikh Hamdan's Sakhee between the banner races on grass and dirt seemed about to pay a $3 million double dividend. Even Tiznow's trainer, Jay Robbins, thought his horse's chance had gone.
But Tiznow was remembering his triumph in the previous year's Classic, and perhaps summoning up the energy stored during a six-month lay-off with a back injury earlier this year. The four-year-old bay colt answered Sakhee's surge, the pair racing neck and neck down the final furlong until the American horse pushed his nose across the line to become the first repeat winner in the race's 18-year history.
"Sakhee tried hard," Dettori said. "He just wasn't getting the propulsion he would have had on turf. But we got beaten by a very tough horse." Only those with meaningful sums on the favourite, Aptitude, or the Irish hope, Galileo (finished sixth), both utterly eclipsed, could have felt bad about a second victory for the reigning American horse of the year.
Three days after watching Tiznow win the Classic at Churchill Downs last year his co-owner, Cecilia Straub-Rubens, died of a heart attack. Now her partner, Michael Cooper, was able to celebrate on her behalf and to reply, when invited to reflect on the significance of the repeat, "Is there any rule against three?" Tiznow's win put an end to another brave streak in the form of three wins in a row for European-trained horses, which seemed to benefit from the sudden drop in temperature. Dettori's victory on Fantastic Light followed wins in the Filly and Mare Turf for Olivier Peslier on Banks Hill and trained in France by Andre Fabre, and of course that famous Irish win in the Juvenile.
A day marked by the presence of rooftop SWAT teams overlooking the paddock parade of fur-coated Nicole Kidman lookalikes and the absence of planes and helicopters in the skies above Long Island had begun with a couple of ominous incidents.
The fireworks concluding the opening ceremony so spooked the honour guard of police horses several of them stampeded.
