Ryan Moore’s injury comes at worst time for Ballydoyle with Flat season in final phase

With all due respect to Lord Allen of Kensington, who finally took up his role as chair of the British Horseracing Authority on Monday promising to turn the sport into “a modern commercial and cultural powerhouse”, the big news of the past few days as far as most punters are concerned was that Ryan Moore, Aidan O’Brien’s stable jockey, will miss the rest of the campaign after sustaining a fractured femur.

There is never a good time to lose your stable jockey, but the timing of Moore’s enforced absence could hardly be worse for O’Brien’s Ballydoyle yard as the 2025 Flat season enters its crucial final phase in Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong.

The seven-week period from 13 September, which is St Leger day in Britain and the first afternoon of Ireland’s Champions Weekend at Leopardstown and the Curragh, includes the two-day Arc meeting at Longchamp, Future Champions Day and Champions Day in Britain and the Breeders’ Cup meeting at Del Mar in California on 31 October and 1 November.

Ballydoyle is, ultimately, in the business of making stallions, and these are the races that will determine the fees on the Coolmore Stud roster when the stable’s current crop of Group One horses heads into retirement. The difference between a narrow success and a fast-finishing short-head second could equate to millions of euros over the course of a stallion’s stud career.

O’Brien has moved swiftly to ensure that Christophe Soumillon will fill the gap on many of the key big-race rides, and he will have back-up from Wayne Lordan, the Ballydoyle No 2 and this year’s Derby winner aboard Lambourn, although Lordan needs to win an appeal against a riding ban to be available on Champions Weekend.

Soumillon has been freelancing since losing his longstanding contract to ride for the late Aga Khan in October 2022, following a notorious incident when he elbowed Rossa Ryan from the saddle mid-race, and rode O’Brien’s Diego Velazquez to victory in the Group One Prix Jacques le Marois at Deauville last month. He also had a Group One double for Ballydoyle at the Arc meeting last year, but has yet to ride a Group One winner for the yard in Britain or Ireland.

“Christophe has always been [part of the Ballydoyle planning],” O’Brien said on Monday. “He’s not tied down to anybody now. He’s a world-class jockey everywhere, he’s been riding for us a lot since he’s been released.

“Wayne is having his appeal this week and obviously Christophe has ridden a lot for us through the year – all those things are changing at the moment. I don’t know how long Ryan is going to be [out injured], but we will tell him to take as much time as he wants.”

Among the realistic and available options for Ballydoyle, Soumillon is an obvious choice to step in, with a wealth of big-race experience in the major racing jurisdictions around the world.

But he is still not Moore, who is, according to the detailed global rankings compiled by the Thoroughbred Racing Commentary, currently the world’s best big-race jockey, a position he has held for much of the last decade. In all, Moore has spent just over 300 weeks at the head of the TRC ranking system since its inception while John Velazquez, next in the list in terms of time at the top, was the leader for 86 weeks in the pre-Covid era.

Moore had, it seems, been riding with an injured femur for a couple of months before it was finally diagnosed last week, and its origin remains unclear. O’Brien suggested at the Curragh on Saturday that it had been an issue since late June, and that Moore, a keen runner, may have sustained a minor fracture while exercising which was then aggravated when he thrown from a horse and landed on his feet in early August.

So he was possibly feeling the injury already when he produced one of the rides of the season to take the Eclipse Stakes on Delacroix in early July, beating John & Thady Gosden’s Ombudsman into second place. That ride alone made a difference of around £700k to the UK trainers’ championship standings, in which the Gosdens currently trail O’Brien by just over £550k.

Moore’s ride on Delacroix was just the latest evidence this summer – following his 12th riders’ title at Royal Ascot in June – that after more than a decade as O’Brien’s No 1, his pre-eminence on the global stage remains intact. His longevity in the Ballydoyle pressure-cooker, meanwhile, is also a significant achievement in its own right, as he has now held the role longer than Mick Kinane (1999-2003) and Johnny Murtagh (2007-10) put together.

Delacroix is, by some way, the most important horse in Ballydoyle this autumn, as he is a son of Dubawi – ie an outcross from the Sadler’s Wells and Galileo colts that form the backbone of the Coolmore roster – out of the top-class mare Tepin, a winner at Royal Ascot and the Breeders’ Cup.

He was only second behind Ombudsman in the International Stakes at York last month, and a victory against the same rival in the Irish Champion Stakes a week on Saturday could add many thousands of euros to his covering fee when he retires to stud at the end of the season.

The timing of Moore’s absence is desperate for the rider himself, for O’Brien and also for the rider’s many fans in the punting fraternity, but for Soumillon, whose last Arc victory was on Zarkava in 2008 and only Breeders’ Cup win came 20 years ago on Shirocco in the Turf, it could open the door to the most successful autumn of his long and storied career.