Thesecretadversary wins Leopardstown Stakes, enters Classic picture

Leopardstown handed Coolmore another spring marker when Thesecretadversary swept through the finish of the G3 Ballylinch Stud Red Rocks Stakes and won by 2 1/2 lengths, a result that moves the three-year-old from promising stakes colt to legitimate Classic player. On a card where the race has been dominated by Aidan O’Brien in recent years, the Fozzy Stack-trained runner underlined how much depth still runs through the wider Magnier-owned pipeline.

The winner carried the colors of Cayton Park Stud and Mrs John Magnier, and his profile now reads like a colt built for the bigger stage. By St Mark’s Basilica out of Too Soon To Panic, a Listed Victor McCalmont Memorial Stakes winner and Group 2 Ridgewood Pearl Stakes-placed mare by Gleneagles, he already had the bloodlines to matter. He is also the second foal out of a mare whose black-type record has now been repaid by a son with the class to keep moving up the ladder.

This was not a soft introduction to the Classic conversation. Run over 7f 42y for about €42,000 on good-to-yielding, good-to-soft ground, the Red Rocks Stakes became untidy when Warsaw was unseated, but Seamie Heffernan kept Thesecretadversary focused and produced him late to put the issue beyond doubt. Power Blue chased him home in second, Redemption Road was third and Geryon fourth in an 11-runner field, while the winner went off at 6/1 and made the margin look comfortable.

The form book around him is now strong enough to demand attention. Thesecretadversary had been narrowly beaten in the Chesham Stakes at Royal Ascot, then landed the Listed Churchill Stakes at Tipperary before ending his two-year-old season in Grade 1 company at Woodbine in Canada. Stack said the colt had been unlucky in Canada and had been working well, and the performance at Leopardstown backed that up.

What changes now is the next tier of planning. Stack has him entered in almost every Guineas except the Italian one, and he also held an entry in a million-dollar Keeneland race on English Guineas day, though that path now looks less likely. The market noticed too, with his 2000 Guineas price cut to 25/1, and after this sort of finish he is no longer a minor player in the Ballydoyle and Coolmore spring hierarchy.