Act One brings curtain down on O`Brien`s bid for colts clean sweep

French horse Act One won the Criterium International here Saturday to end Irish trainer Aidan O`Brien`s hopes of winning all 10 Group One races for juvenile colts in Europe this season.

Act One, ridden by Thierry Gillet and trained by Chantilly-based Englishman Jonathan Pease, held off the challenge of O`Brien`s Landseer at St Cloud racecourse to secure his owner Gerald Leigh only his second Group One success in France.

O`Brien, who saddled half of the six-horse field, had won all eight of the previous Group One races for two-year-olds and his hopes of breaking D Wayne Lukas` world record of 22 Group One wins in a season rest on success in the Criterium de St Cloud here on Tuesday week.

The 31-year-old, who started his career as a jumps trainer before being hired to train out of the Ballydoyle Stables made famous by the unrelated Vincent O`Brien, was his usual phlegmatic self after this reverse. 'He (Landseer) was beaten by a grand horse,' O`Brien said.

'There`s no dishonour in being deprived of a perfect record by a horse like that. 'Records aren`t that important for they are there to be broken and taken away from you.

'It is how the horses perform that is the important thing and he just didn`t have it today,' added the man labelled the whispering genius by the American press for his quietly spoken nature.

Landseer, who started favourite on the back of finishing second to stablemate - the Alex Ferguson-owned Rock of Gibraltar - in the Dewhurst Stakes, had a clear run if he was good enough to overhaul Act One as Michael Kinane brought him with his challenge with 400 metres to race.

Despite getting alongside the French horse Kinane could do nothing as Gillet summoned up one last surge by Act One to breach the line half-a-length to the good.

Kinane dismissed the notion that his colt hadn`t stayed the mile distance which he was attempting for the first time.

'He likes good to soft ground and today I found it a bit sticky but he was beaten by a nice horse,' he said. Leigh, who has been battling cancer and donates all his English prize money to cancer charities, said he expected his colt to play a full part in next year`s Classics despite O`Brien holding four of the first five in the English 2000 Guineas betting.

'The only thing I was worried about today was when I saw him in his box I said to Jonathan `he`s too calm,'` he said.

'That was obviously him playing coy and I think he won very easily beating a good horse in Landseer,' he added.

O`Brien was non-committal about who his runners would be for the final Group One of the season. One of the few criticisms levelled at him is that he doesn`t appear to have a clear idea of which horse is best suited for a particular race - many trainers though would kill for such a position of strength.

- AFP