Ireland's Greatest Racehorses

These days Irish horses dominate jump racing, while one of the finest Derby winners of recent years was Sea The Stars. The greatest steeplechasing horse of all time, Arkle, was Irish-bred and trained. Nijinsky, winner of England's great flat races, was trained in Ireland. Now, Brian O'Connor, Racing Correspondent of the Irish Times, selects a dozen truly great Irish horses of the last hundred years of racing history and devotes a chapter to each, assessing their calibre against the horses they had to beat, and analysing the particular source of each horse's greatness. The horses O'Connor selects are wonderfully different. There is Arkle's almost unearthly indestructibility, utterly trouncing the opposition whatever weight he had to carry in the toughest, most arduous steeplechases, and on the other hand there is Sinndar, the Aga Khan's colt whose quicksilver speed saw him become the first horse ever to win the treble of Epsom Derby, Irish Derby and Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. There is Orby, the first Irish-trained Derby winner at the start of the twentieth century, owned by an Irish-born New York union hard man the King refused to meet, and Moscow Flyer, just as likely to lose concentration and fall, but on his day a brilliant chaser over two miles, the toughest jumping challenge of all. There is the great hurdler Istabraq and the Gold Cup winner Dawn Run, as well as Alleged, the "forgotten horse" that won back-to-back victories under Lester Piggott in the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, and Vintage Crop, who went all the way to Australia in 1993 and won the Melbourne Cup. Witty and trenchant and formidably well-informed, Ireland's Greatest Racehorses is a hugely enjoyable celebration of some of the finest racehorses of all time.

Brian O'Connor is Racing Correspondent of the Irish Times. He is author of three books: Add A Zero, Kings of the Saddle: Ireland's Greatest Jockeys and Ireland's Greatest Racehorses. He lives in Dublin.