Pierre Bonnard

The record looks simple enough on paper: two wins and two places from four races, meaning he has won exactly half his career races so far. But the quality of those wins is what makes this horse stand out. His first win came at Dundalk in August 2025, and he then stepped up to a Class 1 race — one of the very top level of races run in Britain — at Newmarket in October, winning it with enough ease that jockey Christophe Soumillon came back "very happy." In the background, O'Brien's quotes from a stable tour reveal that Pierre Bonnard had actually won three races in a row last year, including a Group 1 in Saint-Cloud — the highest level of race in Europe — on wet, soft ground, which is exactly the kind of test that separates the genuinely talented from the merely promising.

What you hear from O'Brien about this horse is not the cautious, managed optimism that trainers usually trade in. He has called Pierre Bonnard "a Derby horse" outright, and the plan — trials at Leopardstown before a tilt at Epsom — is the roadmap for a horse his the yard genuinely believe could compete for the biggest prizes a three-year-old can win. O'Brien's yard has sent out 144 winners already this season, so when a trainer operating at that volume singles a horse out as something special, it carries real weight.

What comes through in every quote is a description of a horse that is almost suspiciously easy to train — "very straightforward, very relaxed and very chilled" at home, with a long stride and a mind that does not get in its own way. That combination of physical scope and mental calm is rarer than it sounds, and at a mile and a half — the Derby distance — it tends to matter enormously. Pierre Bonnard raced just one day ago and is very much a horse in motion. The story is only getting started.