AS Irish Champions Festival (née Irish Champions Weekend) comes around for the 13th time, it is no harm to consider the big picture of the meeting.

From a personal point of view, it is the best fixture of the year. The timing is ideal, towards the end of the season but not at it, so horses are not over the top nor is it typically run on bottomless ground. I like the concentration of good racing, where basically every race is interesting, and I relish that it is only two days; perhaps I am showing my age, but I find that the longer festivals can drag.

When the meeting was rebranded to Irish Champions Festival in 2023, the two words that were kept were ‘Irish’ and ‘Champions’ and both are important in what the event should be. Irish horses need to make up the bulk of the participants, and we need the best Irish horses, the prospective champions, to take part.

But the meeting also needs runners from outside Ireland to make it a true success. There are terrific flat trainers in Ireland, but three of them come from the same family, and this can be a turn-off, or at least a turn-down, for some people.

The O’Brien family’s piece of the group racing pie in Ireland, the sorts of race that form a big part of ICF, has never been bigger. Combining the runners of Aidan, Joseph and Donnacha, the three trainers have typically broken the low 200s each year in terms of total runners in Irish flat group races since the start of the 2020s.

The highest number in these races was 230 O’Brien runners in 2020, and the figure has never dipped below 203 since then. As a percentage of total runners in group races, the three trainers have made up a bit more than a third of the fields in that time, the figure hovering between 34.4% and 37.4% in those six years.

This year however, they are already at 186, that record of 230 likely to be left behind in 2026, and at the time of the writing their percentage of all runners in Irish group races is at 44.1%.

Welcome visitors

The feature of ICF, the Irish Champion Stakes, has drawn some exotica in recent years. Shin Emperor ran for Japan in the last two renewals, as did Deirdre going back further, while there have been a handful of high-class French runners take their chance too from Onesto, Vadeni and Sottsass, all the way back to Almanzor winning in 2016, that 12-runner field the most competitive in recent years.

But for foreign runners, we must basically read British-trained runners. There was strong British participation in the meeting when it was first launched, indeed they have never done better than the initial Irish Champions Weekend in 2014 where they had eight winners from 50 total runners.

Their participation was consistent through those first three years, always around the 50 total runners, with their average for the first six ICWs being five winners and 46 runners per year. Participation has dipped in the six years since, however, the numbers dropping to 3.2 winners and 29 total runners per year between 2020 and 2025.

Some of that is down to the pandemic years, when travel was difficult for both humans and animals, and there were 30 runners and 19 runners from Britain in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Things have only partially rebounded since, however, with 31, 37 and 33 British runners at ICF in the last three years.

Consider the varying degrees of participation from the top British yards at the meeting. Aidan O’Brien won the Flat Trainers’ Championship in Britain in both 2024 and 2025, and leads again in 2026, and in those years, he has typically been followed home by some combination of Andrew Balding, the Gosdens, William Haggas, Charlie Appleby and Karl Burke.

Haggas and Burke have plenty of runners in Ireland, indeed they are first and second among British trainers with runners in Ireland since 2021, while Appleby has long been a keen participant in Irish Group 1 races at least. Balding and the Gosdens, not so much.

Balding has only had 16 runners in Ireland total since 2017, one of them winning, and just three ICF runners ever. The Gosdens have a brilliant strike-rate in Ireland since 2008 but from very few runners, 14 winners from 33 runners in that time, and eight of those runners have been at ICF.

There could be all sorts of reasons for this, and I won’t speculate to what they all might be now, but one would hope that there is more to it than a desire to avoid taking on Ballydoyle particularly, and the O’Brien family generally.

John Gosden made comments about Ombudsman not running in the Irish Champion Stakes last season – ‘the horse [would not] appreciate running against multiple entries from one stable on a track with a short straight’ – and while he has a point of sorts, away games are a part of most sports, and champions are formed in adversity.

From purely selfish reasons, as a punter and form student that tries to concentrate on Irish racing, fewer British runners at our top meetings makes life easier as one doesn’t have to dig into an unknown formbook, but for the big picture of the event, some stronger competition would be a positive.

PUNTERS should ideally have their heads up for changes, big and small, that are coming and there are a couple that might be worth considering ahead of ICF.

The going is the most obvious one, and the ground at Leopardstown and the Curragh this weekend could be different to most of the summer. There were 470 turf races run in Ireland in June, July and August, and just 10% of them had soft in the going description. Just over 75% of races were run with good in the description, yielding making up the rest.

Of those meetings that were run on soft ground, few were obvious trials for ICF. Leopardstown had two soft ground cards at the start of June, there was some soft ground at Down Royal and Limerick for the meetings that coincided with Royal Ascot while the closing days of Galway made up the rest. The Curragh seemed to race exclusively on nice ground this summer.

Perhaps that will again be the case this weekend, but there is some unsettled weather around, and the slow side of good seems the best-case scenario.

Track configuration is another change to consider. The rail alignment for most of the Thursday meetings at Leopardstown this summer has been narrow, for example the July 23rd card when Florida Bay won the Tyros Stakes, Aidan O’Brien commenting afterwards that it was more like a six-and-a-half-furlong race.

This Saturday’s meeting will be run on a track 24 yards off the innermost line, however, and we have seen horses swing wide towards the chase track many times at this meeting, St Mark’s Basilica in the 2021 Irish Champion Stakes perhaps the most memorable recent example.

The Sovereign Path is another race that has seen winners come wide and late down the near side, though this year that race is second up rather than taking place later in the day.

Unlike meetings during August, the Curragh will be opened wide with the racing line right under the near side rail available to riders. That might typically favour horses drawn high in big fields, but the recent winners of the Bold Lad, the most competitive race on the sprint track on the Sunday of the meeting, have come from a variety of stalls. The last five winners were drawn 7, 20, 23, 9 and 5, while the winner came from stall one in the two years before that.