AIDAN O Brien has a strike-rate this season of 24% with, at the time of writing, 106 winners from 435 runners.

Expectation was high last weekend at Doncaster and the Irish Champions Festival, at which he claimed the two big races of the week with Scandinavia and Delacroix. However, overall, over the four days that comprised those two meetings, he performed a little below expectations, with six winners from 34 runners giving him a strike rate of 17.6%. This does not mean that he is out of form at all. If Gstaad had won the National Stakes instead of losing by a head, his strike rate would have jumped to 20% and, in some races, he had more than one runner.