THE Irish Champion Stakes can be a shoulda, woulda, coulda race with excuses and hard luck stories easy to recall over the years, but the 2025 edition was not one of those runnings. Delacroix may only have won by three quarters of a length, but he was value for more and looked a well up-to-scratch winner of the race.

Not that everyone – me included – believed in him before the race, Aidan O’Brien saying afterwards ‘we saw what he could do in Sandown, and no-one believed it, but they’ve seen it again today.’ The Eclipse win was incredible, but it looked too good to be true and when Delacroix failed to back it up at York, those suspicions grew.