The Times
6th June 2026
If he lands yet another Derby Aidan O’Brien won’t be the only record-breaking trainer in the winners’ circle. What’s more this one was famous before he was. Then she married him, had four high achieving children and now has almost as amazing and certainly a more varied CV than her husband. Take a bow Annemarie O’Brien.
She was only 23 when she became the first woman to become Ireland’s Champion trainer over jumps for the 1992/3 season. She had been a winning jockey herself and many of her successes that season were partnered by amateur rider Aidan O’Brien whom she had married in 1991 after first meeting him circling before the start at Killarney or was it Dromore.
Aidan’s story is well told, Annemarie’s needs to be. She was training as her father Joe Crowley had before her, as her sister Frances would later, and where her son Joseph does now, on the slopes of Owning Hill at Piltown in County Kilkenny. When Joseph was born in May 1993, Aidan took over the licence and proceeded, presumably with considerable help from his predecessor, to win the trainers’ title for the next five seasons.
When I visited Piltown before Cheltenham 30 years ago this February Joseph was a toddler, Sarah a baby, Ana on the way, Donnacha a distant dream and Aidan so fresh faced a 26 year old that he was rugby tackled as an impostor when he tried to get in to the unsaddling enclosure to greet his first Festival winner a fortnight later.
But the bandwagon was already on the roll. Piltown had sent out a record 242 winners in the previous calendar year and after three lots that morning Aidan was off to Ballydoyle where he had been recruited by John Magnier for the seemingly impossible task of succeeding and matching the legendary but unrelated Vincent O’Brien.
The world now knows quite what an astonishing job Aidan has made of it. Champion trainer in Ireland every year since 1999, eight times champion in the UK, 450 Group One races world-wide including 55 Irish Classics, 45 in the UK and of course victory today would be his 12th success in the race and an unprecedented fourth win at Epsom in a row. The Derby sequence was begun 25 years ago by Galileo and to celebrate the quarter centenary ITV will be this afternoon be showing a film in which Aidan reveals the need to win the Derby. “When we first came here,” he says, “we thought we might be 5 years. In our 5th year Galileo came along.”
It is not the only reveal. The film runs less than 10 minutes and while I must declare an interest, I sincerely believe that what Gabriel Byrne and Tim Williams have put together is the most accurate and insightful portrait of the O’Brien phenomenon yet seen. For it brings out Aidan’s unique mix of bubbling, boyish enthusiasm and uncompromising adult perfectionism from which all his success and fame and riches have only sharpened his decision making not blunted it. And the film gives another very clear impression: that the most important thing in Aidan’s life was not going to Ballydoyle, it was meeting a young rider called Annemarie Crowley,
They are the most professionally obsessive of people, “the only time I don’t work is when I sleep” laughs Aidan at one stage. But they adore, they exist for what they do. In a touching passage today’s 56 year old Annemarie looks at archive footage of her young jockey-self riding at Piltown and saying “wow, that’s my home place. I was 21 that year, we got married a couple of months later. We lived in two of the stables that had been converted into living quarters.”
A simple start but don’t doubt that a dream was there and that it was a shared one. “It was always our ambition,” says Annemarie, “to be the best, take on the best and compete at the top level” and as a wife and professional partner she later adds “when I met Aidan it was always obvious to me that he had everything required to make to the top. I have always tried to make sure that Aidan wasn’t distracted from what he had to do.”
Being the closest ally to someone who is delivering the most successful operation of its kind that the world has ever seen, (1st, 2nd and 3rd in the French Derby last week and it could easily be the same today) would be achievement enough but for Annemarie O’Brien it must be hardly half. For a very obvious start, she has been mother and mentor to all four children. Joseph and Donnacha are already high-flying trainers, Sarah is a vet much welcomed at Ballydoyle, and Ana recovered from a life-threatening end to a riding career to become a central player in the family Whisperview breeding operation.
Breeding racehorses has always been a family fascination. When Annemarie was 10, Spindrifter, a horse her father Joe Crowley had bred, set a European record of winning 13 races as a 2-y-o. Eight years later Joe offered her a birthday party or a brood mare. She chose the latter and in 2002 Joe was involved with Annemarie and Aidan in the breeding of Rock Of Gibraltar who won the 2000 Guineas in the process of an unprecedented seven race Group One sequence, Whisperview are now a big scene with recent Irish 1,000 Guineas winner Precise only the latest their glory line.
Ask a busy person. In 2022 Annemarie founded Equimetrics whose V Pro is the last word in wearable exercise monitoring devices for racehorses. In 2025 she became a board member of HRI, Irish racing’s governing board. But it has clearly not distracted from the O’Brien couple’s original purpose. “What else would I be doing?” asks Aidan O’Brien to Gabriel Byrne’s question. “This is what I love doing. If I have to go away for a week I can’t wait to get back. Really it’s my hobby, work, pastime, passion, all rolled into one.”
There’s no dispute in the household. “I believe he will be the greatest of all time,” Annemarie says in closure. “Being here, having access to these thoroughbreds, he will set a record that will be impossible to get near.” The words are said with authority as well as affection. Yes, Aidan is exceptional, but he’s not the only one.