Saturday’s King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Qipco Stakes shapes as a classic head-to-head between Ballydoyle and Godolphin as Auguste Rodin takes on Rebel’s Romance.
Considering how often Europe’s biggest races get billed in those terms it’s notable how rarely racing’s two heavyweight operations deliver such face-to-face confrontations on the track.
The quintessential one remains Galileo vs Fantastic Light in the Irish Champion Stakes, all of 23 years ago. The same race also saw Grandera memorably overcome Hawk Wing a year later.
Otherwise, examples of such eyeball clashes hardly trip off the tongue, apart perhaps from Encke’s defeat of the Triple Crown-chasing Camelot in the 2012 Leger, a contest that remains a stain on the sport after Godolphin’s horse subsequently tested positive for an anabolic steroid.
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This King George, though, can justifiably be teed up in terms of a real clash. The racing arms of the Coolmore and Darley empires each has a 123-rated older star to throw into the fray and for good measure, another of racing’s behemoths, Juddmonte, has the star filly Bluestocking.
She broke her Group One duck earlier this month in the Pretty Polly, but it is her two big rivals that can boast 11 top-flight victories between them.
Auguste Rodin is aiming at a seventh Group One success, a superb tally considering how his form has dipped so spectacularly at times, perhaps most of all in last year’s King George. If he atones this time, he will join a handful of former Aidan O’Brien stars to reach that figure at the highest level.
As a gelding, Rebel’s Romance has been allowed mature into an international prize-money machine for Charlie Appleby, including this year in March’s Sheema Classic and subsequently in Hong Kong.
With a Breeders’ Cup and a pair of German Group One’s under his belt in 2022, the Godolphin star now gets a shot at breaking his top-flight duck in Britain.
Both horses relish quick ground conditions, while Bluestocking appears to require some ease to be at her best.
With Hans Andersen likely to perform pacemaking duties, and Luxembourg a very worthy second-string, O’Brien has a major hand as he tries to land British racing’s traditional midsummer all-aged highlight for a fifth time.
Galileo remains the only three-year-old to win in it for the Irishman and the King George’s original role to stage a clash of the generations has been significantly upended since then.
Just four of the Classic generation have emerged on top in the last 20 years and the only ‘junior’ lining up this time is last month’s Irish Derby runner-up Sunway.
Ridden by Oisín Murphy at the Curragh, Sunway will be ridden here by James Doyle who faces getting down to do 8.12. The upside is an 11lb swing from his older male opponents – and 8lbs from Bluestocking – which is a significant plus by any measure.
Nevertheless, as has so often been the case throughout his career, much of the intrigue revolves around which version of Auguste Rodin turns up.
He tailed off and was beaten over 120 lengths in last year’s King George before success in the Irish Champion Stakes and Breeders’ Cup suggested a maturing talent, only for him to flop again behind Rebel’s Romance in Meydan.
O’Brien suggested after last month’s battling success in the Prince Of Wales’s Stakes that he’s only now starting to work out what’s tactically optimum for his mercurial star.
“In last year’s King George, it was soft ground and we probably held him up too much. When Ryan [Moore] felt he was not going to win, he eased him out of it, and the run probably was not as bad as it looked,” the Irishman said.
As a result, Moore could well have Auguste Rodin racing more prominently than in the past, an interesting prospect since Rebel’s Romance has also raced prominently this season, particularly on home ground in Meydan.
That promises a scenario where Moore and William Buick eyeball each other from some way out with the prospect perhaps of another epic King George finish to look forward to.
Last year’s victory by Hukum over Westover added to a lengthy catalogue of such exciting finishes, with the most memorable of all still being Grundy’s landmark defeat of Bustino, all of 49 years ago.
Emulating the resonance that famous duel up the Ascot straight will be a long shot. But the odds on a good old-fashioned set-to between racing’s big guns won’t be anywhere near as generous.
