The Times
6th June 2026
Fresh talent is a thrilling thing. The filly Thundering On and Ireland’s young champion jockey Dylan Browne McMonagle gave Epsom the sort of racing memory it craves as they took this Oaks with a dazzlingly smooth last-to-first destruction of what beforehand had seemed to be a highly competitive field. Legacy Link was almost four lengths adrift at the line with another six to the rest. Thundering On is a talent and so are all her team.
British racing in general and Epsom in particular spends too long harping back to the glories of the past. A 33% year on year increase in yesterday’s crowd was a return on the efforts at rejuvenation. So one of the joys of Thundering On’s triumph was that these were new names and new stars on the roll of honour even if the trainer’s name was O’Brien. No,not a 12th Oaks for Aidan O’Brien but a first for his son Joseph who is already becoming even more proficient as a trainer than as a Derby winning champion jockey.
He’s only just turned 33 but Joseph O’Brien seems to have been around for ages. Camelot the first of his two Derbies as a rider was back in 2012. But Thundering On’s owner and breeder Shapoor Mistry has just five mares and six horses in training and is new to British racing big time although he did win the Group One Pretty Polly Stakes in Ireland in 202 with Thundering On’s dam Thundering Heights, also trained by Joseph O’Brien.
As chairman of the construction giant Shapoorji Pallonji Group, Shapoor Mistry is a huge figure in business but he was getting the small payer’s joyfrom his filly’s success. “It’s a dream come true,” he said. “We bred the dam and we also had the granddam, so the family has been with us for a long time.”
Dylan Browne McMonagle has been earmarked for riding greatness since he won the Dingle Derby at the age of twelve, then the pony racing championship, two apprentice championships and then, last year, champion jockey in Ireland itself. He was solitaire cool as he held Thundering On calmly at the back of the field which was led, as expected, by the Aidan O’Brien pair Sugar Island and Cameo setting the gallop for the favourite, their stable companion Amelia Earhart.
But none of them could defend as Legacy Link swept through with Thundering On and a motionless McMonagle in her wake. Twenty pumps on the reins and the Oaks was over. “She’s got a lot of class,” McGongagle said of the chestnut winner, “and it was a great training performance from Joseph. I’m just lucky to have the leg-up. The sky’s the limit for her.”
So it is for the jockey and especially for the trainer. 14 years ago Joseph O’Brien was a tortured thin classic winning jockey. Now he is quietly spoken, round cheeked, bespectacled, rather cerebral figure reflecting on the change in life. “Of course riding a Derby winner is special,” he says, “but so much goes into this that for me the thrill of training winners is like nothing else.”
Yesterday there was thrill enough in watching.