Derby winner Jack Hobbs© Photo Healy Racing
The temptation after every Irish Derby is to read long-term implications into each individual renewal, sometimes positive, but more often in recent years the reaction has been sombre. After Australia's 1-8 rout in 2014 Ireland's premier classic was even written off as a meaningful contest. Maybe the lesson from Jack Hobbs' odds on victory in 2015 is to ease up on portentous readings of the classic tealeaves.
After all, who would have predicted a colt winning his maiden at Wolverhampton two days after Christmas would end up acclaimed as a thoroughly meritorious classic winner with legitimate claims to landing the Arc later this season.
Listening to some of last year's doomsayers, the idea of anyone bar Coolmore winding up on the Irish Derby winners podium ever again was all but laughable. Yet the race winds up with their greatest rivals at Godolphin. The cyclical nature at flat racing's top level may be confined to a tiny elite but if nothing else financial clout means the idea of complete long-term dominance is unsustainable.
Complacency always has to be avoided though and credit is due to the Curragh team for the initiatives taken with entry and qualification inducements on the run-up to the race. Sceptics might suggest the only reason competition questions haven't been an issue after this Derby is a comparatively underwhelming bunch of middle-distance three year olds at Ballydoyle but at least the basis for exploiting that were in place.
And what the Irish Derby also has in place is the prestige that still makes it one of the three most coveted Derbies in Europe with only Kentucky's Run for the Roses to compare anywhere else in the world at the moment, although surely Japan's Tokyo Yushun will join that club sooner rather than later. Maybe Steve Cauthen, famously winner of all four in Europe and the US, might have to come back!
Still, despite having poured cold water on predictions of doom, there's still no getting away though from how both the English and French Derby winners, Golden Horn and New Bay, are set to clash in this Saturday's Eclipse.
Like it or not, the lure of a potential Group 1 win against older horses over ten furlongs appears to be more attractive than risking a reputation at the Curragh. So those bemoaning Aidan O'Brien's Irish Derby dominance over the years might consider what the race would look like without those Ballydoyle horses getting kept at home rather than routed to Sandown.
But teasing out Derby implications is a piece of cake compared to navigating a route through the continuing internecine conflict within Irish racing, conflict that bubbled underneath the surface for some time but is now spewing out in all directions and from all sources, with the HRI board even writing to the Turf Club querying the suitability of the new Sherriff in town, Chris Gordon, the Turf Club's head of security, suing the Trainers Association for defamation.
The letter to the Racing Post by Liz Doyle over a stable inspection in 2014, during which a disputed document, purportedly arising out of the investigation into the 'warned off' former veterinary official John Hughes, was presented to her, indicates the depth of feeling involved with the trainer stating the matter has her seriously questioning the Turf Club's integrity.
For an industry that likes to solve problems 'in-house' this is serious stuff. With lawyers already on the scene, there's no percentage in getting more of them involved through speculating about right and wrong on either entrenched side.
But with emotions running high, it might be no harm for people to remember some big picture stuff and question the suitability of everyone resolutely fighting their own corner. It would certainly be no harm to remember to how this looks to Joe and Jo Public, those without an agenda, who are also, and let's not forget this, the ones bankrolling the game through public money.
All this is fundamentally rooted in the steroids controversy that so badly sullied Irish racing's reputation and jolted it out of years of smug assumptions of its own purity. The Turf Club were caught with their trousers badly down and understandably people wanted to know why. The onus was on racing's police, along with the Department of Agriculture, to better police doping for everyone's sake, none more so than the new Sherriff.
Whatever the rights and wrongs on this, and whatever the specific individual nuances, there's no escaping how this looks superficially - trainers and other professionals warring with department and Turf Club officials charged with the job of fighting the doping scourge within racing.
The reality is being lost in all of this: that it is doping which is the real enemy and those of us in the 'out-house' are entitled to know why that's being allowed to happen.
The how, where, what, who and when are important individually but overall it is surely the 'why' that counts and that's straight-forward - to fight doping. During these stable inspections it has been said that stones have been lifted that have never been lifted before. It betrays a noticeable lack of confidence when an industry can't cope with that, even more so when it can't do so without tearing itself apart over comparatively minor detail.
Last week the BHA announced a review of its integrity role in British racing. It might be no bad thing for something similar to happen here. But it should be a meaningful look at the integrity issue - not yet another expensive cut-and-paste accumulation of vested interests which tells us everything we already know - which acknowledges how it is in everyone's interests within a self-regulating sport that the industry is properly policed.
The chances of that happening anytime soon however are slim indeed since currently there would hardly be agreement among all the relevant parties as to who should do the reviewing.
