The highlights on his CV are hard to argue with. He has won four of the sport's top-level races, picking up Class 1 victories at two of the most prestigious venues in the calendar — Ascot and Newmarket. Ascot in June and Newmarket in both September 2023 and July 2024 are not places where you stumble into success. These are races where the best horses in training line up, and O'Brien's yard has been competitive on the biggest days.
The partnership with jockey Gavin Ryan is worth paying attention to. Ryan has ridden 135 horses for O'Brien, producing 17 winners between them — again, roughly 1 in every 8. That kind of consistency across a high volume of rides suggests real communication and trust between trainer and jockey, the sort of working relationship that tends to get better over time rather than worse.
There are two areas where O'Brien appears to have a particular edge. On wet or muddy ground, his horses win at a noticeably higher rate — 4 wins from just 20 races, which works out at 1 in every 5. That 20% figure is significantly better than his overall average, suggesting he either has horses well-suited to those conditions or knows exactly when to run them. And at Killarney specifically, he has won 3 races from just 8 runners — nearly 1 in every 3 — which in racing terms is the kind of record that makes rivals nervous whenever his name appears in a race card there.
Still only four years in, O'Brien is already operating at a level that takes some trainers decades to reach. The question now is not whether he can compete at the top — he has already answered that — but how far and how quickly he can build on it.
| Course | Races | Wins | Win rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dundalk | 46 | 8 | 17.4% |
| The Curragh | 38 | 5 | 13.2% |
| Leopardstown | 25 | 3 | 12% |
| Naas | 22 | 5 | 22.7% |
| Cork | 18 | 0 | 0% |
| Navan | 12 | 0 | 0% |
| Gowran Park | 10 | 2 | 20% |
| Killarney | 8 | 3 | 37.5% |
| Down Royal | 7 | 1 | 14.3% |
| Tipperary | 7 | 0 | 0% |
| Limerick | 6 | 0 | 0% |
| Listowel | 4 | 0 | 0% |
| Galway | 3 | 1 | 33.3% |
| Newmarket | 3 | 0 | 0% |
| Sligo | 3 | 0 | 0% |
| Roscommon | 3 | 0 | 0% |
| Bellewstown | 2 | 1 | 50% |
| Punchestown | 2 | 1 | 50% |
| Fairyhouse | 2 | 0 | 0% |
| Ascot | 2 | 0 | 0% |
| abu_dhabi | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| Ballinrobe | 1 | 0 | 0% |