The Weekly Wrap

No dice in France on Sunday, then, and it looks as though Aidan O'Brien may need a fairly extraordinary week even by his standards to have a chance of nailing that Group 1 record this year. But at least Ryan Moore will arrive in Australia on a roll after his lucrative detour to Japan, and there is certainly an air of unfinished business about their candidate for the G1 Melbourne Cup on Tuesday.

Now Ballydoyle has, of course, for many years bought heartily into the Breeders' Cup as the ultimate crucible of transatlantic competition. Since its inception, of course, other countries have inaugurated or evolved their own staging posts on a maturing international circuit: Hong Kong, for instance, and nowadays Royal Ascot. The whole premise is to dismantle frontiers and that, for those of us fortunate enough to be heading to Santa Anita, is what makes the next few days so enjoyable both on and off the track.

As British voters have recently shown, however, that same process will goad some people only into resentment and retrenchment. And in Australia the annual appearance of a growing European armada for the Cup has occasionally provoked similar misgivings. While Michelle Payne famously removed another barrier last year, the fact was that three of the next four home were European raiders. The five previous winners, moreover, had all been imported from Europe, three still being trained there. The sentiments of many locals made one of them, Protectionist, seem particularly well named.

As with any cultural exchange, however, there is always a long-term dividend in allowing others to challenge one's own deficiencies. Even as the Australians respond to the evidence by importing a better class of stayer, so their relative strengths are being grafted into the European Thoroughbred through an expanding cadre of speedy stallions.

Nonetheless, there remains that stubborn sense of alienation between two racing cultures with so much in common. Arguably that was never more evident than when O'Brien was hauled back from his hotel dinner to face an inquisition over the tactics deployed on his three Cup challengers in 2008. They had attacked from the front, precisely to expose chinks in the stamina of their pursuers, but on firm going finished in varying degrees of footsore disarray.

To those who admire O'Brien as much for his relentless humility as for deeds that far surpass any that have made lesser trainers swollen with self-regard, his treatment that day smacked of vindictiveness and humiliation. Perhaps O'Brien and/ or his patrons took a similar view, waiting until 2015 for their next crack at the race–albeit they amply renewed local respect when sending Adelaide (Ire) (Galileo {Ire}) to win the Cox Plate the previous year.

And there is a persuasive precision to the way Bondi Beach (Ire) (Galileo {Ire}) has been prepared this time round, having shown up last year only at the end of giddy rise through the ranks in his first campaign. Bondi Beach! What a name for a Cup winner from soggy Co Tipperary. Destiny calls. The uproar of 2008 is all water under the bridge, no doubt. Eight years is a long time. Ample, in fact, to ensure the dish will be served nice and cold.

A Sale Full Of Intrigue…

Australians, of course, were conspicuous among those who exploited a Brexit-poisoned exchange rate at the Horses-in-Training Sale at Tattersalls this week. At 520,000gns, clearly, Harlem (GB) (Champs Elysees {GB}) will need to sing for his supper. But at least prizemoney down under gives him rather more of a chance of making good on the investment than might have been the case had the underbidders prevailed at 500,000gns and sent him jumping. As it is, he has still only made eight starts on the Flat and his sire has a habit of quietly eking sustained improvement out of his stock. Harlem was actually featured here a couple of times earlier in the season, as being singularly unsuited by the lack of pace in French races. Stepped up in distance for his latest start, he faded late, though there may well have been other reasons for that given the stamina in his pedigree. If he arguably deserved the chance to emulate Flintshire (GB) (Dansili {GB}) in the U.S., it is hard to argue when his owner can draw stumps to such lucrative effect.

This is always an especially interesting (and frustrating) sale for those of us rich only in opinion. There's always a moment when you find yourself wondering quite what it is you must be missing. Certainly you have to doubt whether Mr John Lenihan will ever regret spending just 22,000gns for a 2-year-old filly out of a half-sister to Invincible Spirit (Ire) (Green Desert) and Kodiac (GB) (Danehill). Okay, so Shawami (Ire) (Acclamation {GB}) has shown little on the track to date for Mick Channon, but it is hard to conceive of the deformity or debility sufficient to disqualify her, suitably mated, from any self-respecting paddock. Put that pedigree in the breeding stock sale and a few of the big farms and agents might well have woken from their slumbers.

It's always fun, also, to see who has spotted the same errors in the campaigning of a horse–and the dizzy premium paid for stock discarded by certain trainers. I always wonder how their windfalls are received by the startled owners of horses whose limits, on the face of it, have been irretrievably established.

Not that anyone can hope to replicate the Jet Setting (Ire) (Fast Company {Ire}) coup last year. The transformation of the 12,000gn ugly duckling into a £1.3-million swan has since become so familiar that I had forgotten how her first run for Adrian Keatley was only a month after she changed hands, when third of seven in a listed race at Chantilly. Job done, you'd have thought. Black type, bingo. Well bought. The winner? Filly named La Cressoniere (Fr) (Le Havre {Ire}).

Things Looking Up On The Wiltshire Downs…

Roger Charlton's windfall with Cloudberry (GB) (Pivotal {GB})– who multiplied her value last week, since returning to Beckhampton from the July Sale, by a factor of nearly 20–made it seem pretty timely that he should saddle such a promising winner for Cloudberry's previous owner, Lady Rothschild, at Newmarket on Saturday. Yellowhammer (GB) (Raven's Pass) had clearly learned a great deal from her debut, last off the bridle here, and as such would seem to take sooner after her dam, a G1 Cheveley Park S winner, than her aunt, triple Oaks winner Alexandrova (Ire) (Sadler's Wells). It is worth recoding how Charlton has this season yet again maintained his metronomic dependability. In fact he has only once accumulated more domestic prizemoney, and done so at a customarily rock-solid clip of 19%.

The dry autumn in England has allowed a lot of backward juveniles to get started in unusually congenial conditions. One of the more outlandish winners, over the same strip as Yellowberry the previous day, was a 25-1 shot sent up from another Wiltshire yard. Brian Meehan's youngsters have historically tended to progress a good deal for a debut, and those that do win first time out are often pretty smart. Giovanni Battista (Ire) (Clodovil {Ire}) is a €50,000 Goffs yearling whose relatively modest pedigree identifies a 3-year-old in the making; and he has already been cut. Yet he bounded through this race with his ears pricked and, having seen off one sustained challenger, then caused a lovely Godolphin Street Cry (Ire) colt to falter and hang after swooping through to pick up the pieces.

It must be said that Meehan finds himself badly in need of another good 'un. But perhaps he can comfort himself, as he watches the Breeders' Cup from the wrong side of the ocean, that neither Red Rocks (Ire) (Galileo {Ire}) nor Dangerous Midge (Lion Heart) showed anything like so much as this one on debut.

Waldgeist: World Is His Oyster…

Meehan is hardly alone, of course, in what has been a challenging season for so many yards across Europe. So how nice to think of the sport's most charming smile back on the face of Saeed bin Suroor after Thunder Snow (Ire) (Helmet {Aus}) in France yesterday won him his first Group 1 outside Dubai since Farhh (GB) (Pivotal) in the 2013 G1 Champion S.

Even in defeat this race offered a boost to O'Brien, however, the winner offering a rather more literal boost to the Dewhurst form of Churchill (Ire) (Galileo {Ire}) than did Rivet (Ire) (Fastnet Rock {Aus}) in showing his true colours the previous weekend. Moreover, Thunder Snow had previously bumped into two other Ballydoyle juveniles in War Decree (War Front) at Goodwood and Caravaggio (Scat Daddy) at Ascot. Though conceivably he, like so many stablemates, was not firing on all cylinders then.

Certainly the other Group 1 winner at Saint-Cloud had not reached anything like his full capacity when going down narrowly in a Group 3 at Chantilly on his previous start. It's worth looking at that run again, in the context of what Waldgeist (GB) (Galileo {Ire}) did yesterday. It was a muddling, five-runner affair in which this stoutly-bred colt gave the winner a start. Watch how, on only his second start, he repeatedly switched leads even as a gap belatedly opened, only just finding his stride when bearing down late. This, the ultimate test of stamina for a European juvenile, allowed him much fuller expression of what remains a pretty raw talent.