The Dubai Duty Free Irish Derby has been run at the Curragh every summer since 1866, and across that 160 year history it has never once lost its place as the biggest day on the Irish flat racing calendar. It is Ireland’s answer to Epsom, run a month later and over the same mile and a half, and it has produced a roll of honour that reads like a list of the greatest horses to ever race in Europe, from Nijinsky and Shergar through to Galileo and Camelot. This Sunday it is run as the centrepiece of the three day Irish Derby Festival, with the winner picking up just over €725,000 in prize money.
No trainer has shaped this race the way Aidan O’Brien has. Seventeen winners and counting, including the last three runnings in a row, and well over a third of his runners in this race since 2004 have gone on to finish in the frame. History also leans heavily in the home team’s favour more broadly, with the vast majority of recent winners trained in Ireland rather than shipped in, and the form book is unusually predictable in one specific way too, almost every winner of the last decade had run within a month of this exact race, while horses returning from a longer break have a miserable record here. This is not a contest where fresh legs and surprise packages tend to prosper. It rewards proven, recent, top level form, and that is exactly the kind of detail RHR likes to build a view around rather than just going on reputation alone.
This year’s renewal is built entirely around one story, whether Aidan O’Brien can land the Epsom and Irish Derby double for the sixth time, a feat he has already pulled off with Galileo, High Chaparral, Camelot, Australia and last year’s winner Lambourn. Five of the eight runners declared for Sunday come from the O’Brien family, four for Aidan and one for his son Joseph, and the market is shaped entirely around which of them is the right one to follow.
Benvenuto Cellini goes off favourite and arrives with the single biggest unanswered question in the field. He won the Chester Vase in fine style earlier in the season and was sent off the market leader at Epsom, only for his Derby to effectively end before it began when a hind leg became trapped on the stalls at the start. He never got into the race at all, finished tenth, and the stewards subsequently ruled the incident had materially affected his chance, voiding bets placed on him. Nobody really knows what he is capable of yet, and that uncertainty alone explains why he heads the betting.
Raaheeb is the value angle that every tipster keeps coming back to. Unbeaten in two starts for Owen Burrows, and a full brother to the brilliant Baaeed and the Group One winning Hukum, he was deliberately kept away from Epsom so he could arrive fresh for this instead. Opinion on him is split right down the middle. Some believe he is the type to take the step up in his stride and beat the O’Brien battalion outright. Others feel he is priced more on the strength of his pedigree than on form that has actually been tested, and there are question marks over whether he handles quick ground as well as his more cautiously managed brothers did.
James J Braddock, trained by Joseph O’Brien, arrives with a detail that gets lost in the headlines around the bigger names. He has already beaten Pierre Bonnard twice this season, first when getting up late to win the Leopardstown Derby Trial, and then again at Epsom itself, finishing third to Bonnard’s seventh. Whatever the market makes of the pair of them now, the head to head is settled for us.
Pierre Bonnard was the horse at the head of the betting over the winter after a brilliant juvenile campaign that included a Group One win in France, but the season has not gone to plan since. He failed to win either of his trials at Leopardstown and was already held off twice by James J Braddock before finishing seventh at Epsom, getting caught too far back to mount any kind of challenge. Aidan O’Brien is standing by him and says he has been working well at home, but the bare evidence so far this year tells a different story to the one that was written about him last winter.
Action was effectively the pacemaker for stablemate Christmas Day at Epsom, setting the gallop that his stable companion went on to exploit, and he finished a well beaten twelfth. He had also flopped as a well backed favourite in an earlier trial, and while the yard insists the better ground at the Curragh should suit him, there is little hard evidence yet to support a big step forward.
And then there is Christmas Day, and this is where RHR’s interest in this race really sits. He was sent off only the third string in the Ballydoyle ranks at Epsom, behind both Benvenuto Cellini and Pierre Bonnard in the market, and he beat them both anyway, travelling with real authority through testing ground before pulling away to win by two and three quarter lengths. He is closely related to last year’s Irish Derby and Epsom Derby winner Lambourn, sharing that same uncomplicated, relentless galloping style that seems to be a hallmark of this particular family, and trainer Aidan O’Brien has been clear that he sees the Curragh as the obvious home for him next. He arrives as the genuine Epsom Derby winner rather than a horse trying to bounce back from an excuse, he already has the proven form at the trip and at the top level that this race so consistently rewards, and at his current price he looks the value option compared to a market leader who still has everything to prove. RHR’s selection for the 2026 Dubai Duty Free Irish Derby is Christmas Day.
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