St Nicholas Abbey needs to go the distance
Nine months ago he was an unknown, in six months’ time he could be a legend but it will take less than 100 seconds on Saturday to determine whether St Nicholas Abbey is potentially the eighth wonder or more one of the five-minute variety.
He goes to post at Newmarket for the stanjames.com 2000 Guineas as the horse who could turn Guineas into millions. When Sea The Stars galloped into retirement, with his spine-tingling victory in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe last October, he left behind a void.
Having lit up the spring, summer and autumn of an unbeaten year, he also left a winter of contemplation over whether there would be a colt bestowed upon the 2010 season who could match his deeds. A horse such as Sea The Stars was never going to be an easy act to follow but St Nicholas Abbey already has one up on last season’s star.
Nothing stirs the imagination like an unbeaten racehorse and this striking bay with the white blaze completed an unbeaten juvenile season (Sea The Stars was beaten on his debut run) when he won the Racing Post Trophy at Doncaster in October. It was a performance that caught the imagination, not least of the official handicapper, who rated St Nicholas Abbey as the top two-year-old in Europe, by which time the Classic debate had already gathered a momentum that would take it all the way to the Rowley Mile course for the first Saturday in May.
When asked about the horse, his trainer, Aidan O’Brien, said: "He's one of those unique horses who is bred to stay but who has speed. When you look at that turn of toe he showed today - it was effortless. We’ll be looking at the Guineas and all the Classics next year."
This is not an untypical O’Brien assessment, which sometimes sound like advertising copy for the following year’s Coolmore stallion brochure. Another stock O’Brien phrase is to say that “nothing is ruled in and nothing is ruled out” in terms of race plans. Sea The Stars changed the rules by which horses will be measured in this decade and O’Brien, John Magnier and his Coolmore partners, have an opportunity to push a boundary that was considered too much even for Sea The Stars, who won six Group One races as a three-year-old.
In the hour after Sea The Stars had added the Derby to his victory in the 2000 Guineas the question was put to his trainer, John Oxx, about an attempt on the St Leger and thus the completion of the Triple Crown; something that has not been achieved since Nijinsky in 1970. The scholarly Oxx had agonised over whether his horse’s stamina could be stretched to 12 furlongs for Epsom and he quietly declined the risk of adding another two-and-a-half furlongs to the task but said: “I’m a believer in the Triple Crown and I think within the next 10 years we will probably see a Triple Crown winner as there are some really good middle-distance stallions around now.”
One of those is Montjeu, the sire of St Nicholas Abbey, and his son clearly has the make and shape of a Derby contender and, possibly St Leger too, but can he match Sea The Stars by winning the 2000 Guineas as well?
History does not appear to be on his side. Apart from the fact that Sea The Stars was the first colt since Nashwan, in 1989, to complete the Guineas-Derby double, the Racing Post Trophy has not proved a very good trial for the Guineas with only one colt, High Top, achieving in both races in 1971-72.
St Nicholas Abbey, named after a sugar plantation in Barbados, used his telling turn of foot to win at Doncaster but was that beating a field of tyro middle-distance runners rather the next generation of milers? His pedigree strongly suggests he will need middle distances this season. Montjeu has yet to sire a top-class miler, which is partly because his success has been as the progenitor of Derby winners which has, in turn, attracted breeders looking to produce that type of stamina-imbued progeny. St Nicholas Abbey became the third son of Montjeu – from what was then only six crops of racing age – to win the Racing Post Trophy. The other two were Motivator and Authorized, who both went on to win the Derby in the following season, but never raced over a mile as a three-year-old.
If he has trained on – something that can only be taken on trust until the acid test of the racecourse – the greatest adversary in the Guineas could be his own frame and whether the winter growth and development may have taken the raw speed needed for Newmarket and replaced it with the stamina gifts required for Epsom and beyond.
Even O’Brien gave a hint to that not so long ago when he said: “He’s a horse with plenty of speed and class and, by Montjeu, you’d hope that he’d get much further than a mile.”
For St Nicholas Abbey the first mile could prove the hardest.
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