Bolgeresque endurance: typically hardy colts highlight master trainer's quality

It is a rare and impressive thing when a trainer simultaneously has the two best horses in a division. Jim Bolger has won the 2,000 Guineas and the Irish 2,000 Guineas in the same year with different horses, a thing that had only been done twice in the past half-century and then only from Ballydoyle.

Any Classic victory is impressive, but an outsider might muse to themselves that sometimes a good horse finds its way to a particular stable and just can't help being good. The most doubting of Thomases will run out of queries, however, if you bring along two horses capable of winning the most coveted prizes so that the biggest danger to either is the other one.

Given the scale of the achievement, surprisingly little was made of it when John Gosden pulled off the equivalent feat in the Derbys of 2015, thanks to Golden Horn and Jack Hobbs, the first trainer to do it in those races. Amazingly, but also believably, Aidan O'Brien has turned it into normality by doing the Derby double with different horses in three of the past four years.