Aidan O'Brien emphasises importance of Auguste Rodin after ninth Derby victory

Deep Impact’s small final crop yielded a winner in traditionally the most significant race for a breed-shaper, the Betfred Derby.

It had been a day of reckoning for Auguste Rodin, whose trainer Aidan O’Brien is always duty-bound to accentuate the positives of prospective stallions for his employers at Coolmore but had seemed to reach for his highest selection of superlatives in this colt’s case.

There were feasible excuses for his disappointing run in the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket but only victory here could restore a shiny reputation; anything else and he would probably have spent the rest of the season trying to salvage a portion of it. Neither the unrelenting test of Epsom nor any stray protesting zealots were about to get in Ryan Moore’s way as he built up enough of a head of steam to whittle away the outsider King Of Steel’s advantage in the final furlong.

Deep Impact died nearly four years ago now and the scale of his achievement here cannot be undersold. He has just a dozen three-year-olds left to represent him around the world and one has reached the summit.

It also means that the Japanese giant has swept three of the five British Classics, with Saxon Warrior managing Guineas glory in 2018 before finishing an unfortunate fourth in the Derby, while two years ago the ill-fated Snowfall was an exhilarating 16-length winner of the Oaks. 

The 1,000 Guineas has now gone and probably the Leger too at least for Auguste Rodin, with the chance of a first Triple Crown winner since 1970 now lost. Perhaps only Saxon Warrior’s full-brother Drumroll, promoted to first in last week’s scruffy Gallinule Stakes, could end up going in Doncaster's direction as a quietly progressive sort of colt.

Deep Impact: became a stallion great after a magnificent racing careerCredit: Edward Whitaker

Auguste Rodin, already one of Deep Impact's 59 top-level winners from Doncaster last autumn, was having his first try at further than a mile but had plenty of Epsom in his blood as the first foal of Rhododendron, the Galileo mare who not only won three Group 1s but was second to Enable as an odds-on favourite in the 2017 Oaks.

Deep Impact, by a Kentucky Derby winner in Sunday Silence, is also related to the magnificent 1989 hero of Epsom, Nashwan, on his dam’s side. His mother, Wind In Her Hair, was second to Balanchine in the 1994 Oaks for the late John Hills.

A decade of dominance as Japan’s champion sire, including a domestic Triple Crown winner in his own mould through Contrail, have cast Deep Impacts into similarly expensive collector’s items as Auguste Rodin’s namesake’s sculptures. Coolmore were among those to secure a few orders but O’Brien singled out the decision by the organisation’s supremo John Magnier to send Rhododendron to him for her maiden cover to be an "unbelievable call".

"I think this is the most important horse [for Coolmore] ever, because he’s out of Rhododendron, who is one of the best, if not the best, Galileo mares, and he’s by probably the best Japanese stallion ever," he said. "We know what is happening with Japanese breeding, and we know about our own breeding, and he’s connecting the two of them."

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