The fillies grabbed the spotlight on Day 2 of the York Ebor Festival last week, with the Group 1 Yorkshire Oaks taking top billing on an excellent seven-race card. Only four lined up for the 2025 edition of this £600,000 race, but the contest still presented an intriguing head-to-head battle.
Having come out on top at Epsom and the Curragh, dual Classic heroine Minnie Hauk started as the warm favourite for the Aidan O’Brien operation. Stablemate Garden Of Eden looked set to make the running, while Ed Walker’s Qilin Queen had a lot to find on the formbook. However, in the David O’Meara-trained four-year-old Estrange, Minnie Hauk faced a potentially dangerous rival.
Arriving on the back of a win in the Lancashire Oaks at Haydock, Estrange has the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe pencilled in as an autumn assignment. Minnie Hauk had the benefit of a 9lb weight advantage on her first clash with an older runner, but a late drift from 1/3 to 8/15 suggested punters were wary of the threat posed by Estrange.
Hauk Too Strong
Once underway, the race unfolded almost exactly as many predicted. Wayne Lordan ensured Garden Of Eden fulfilled her pacemaking duties, with the filly setting a solid gallop before beginning to tire in the straight.
Ryan Moore and Minnie Hauk took up the running at the furlong pole as a smooth-travelling Estrange emerged as the only threat. Despite briefly moving alongside the market leader, Estrange had no answers to Minnie Hauk’s final finishing effort as she forged clear for an impressive 3½-length success.
Having won five of the past six editions of this contest, O’Brien’s flat dominance is firmly in evidence in this one. With nine wins in total, the master of Ballydoyle joins Mathew Dawson and Sir Michael Stoute at the top of the all-time trainers’ table.
Minnie Adds to Oaks Collection
For Minnie Hauk, this represented a fourth Oaks win of 2025 – adding to her victories in the Cheshire Oaks, Epsom Oaks, and Irish Oaks. To place this achievement in perspective, the only other filly to win all four races during their three-year-old campaign is the brilliant Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner Enable. And she was quite something!
While only two runners have completed the quartet of Oaks wins, Minnie Hauk became the eighth filly to claim the Group 1 treble of the Epsom Oaks, Irish Oaks, and Yorkshire Oaks. Her seven predecessors and their subsequent significant victories were:
- Fair Salina (1978) – Subsequent Group 1 Wins: None
- Diminuendo (1988) – Subsequent Group 1 Wins: None
- User Friendly (1992) – Subsequent Group 1 Wins: St Leger Stakes (1992), Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud (1993)
- Ramruma (1999) – Subsequent Group 1 Wins: None
- Alexandrova (2006) – Subsequent Group 1 Wins: None
- Enable (2017) – Subsequent Group 1 Wins: Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe (2017, 2018), Breeders’ Cup Turf (2018), Coral-Eclipse (2019), King George VI And Queen Elizabeth Stakes (2019, 2020), Yorkshire Oaks (2019)
- Snowfall (2021) – Subsequent Group 1 Wins: None
Longchamp and Del Mar Possible Targets
With the notable exception of the phenomenal Enable, it is really surprising that most triple Oaks heroines failed to win another top-tier event during their careers. Minnie Hauk’s quest to buck that trend is most likely to take her to Longchamp for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe or Del Mar for the Breeders’ Cup Festival.
The bookmakers were impressed with this latest victory, seeing Minnie Hauk’s odds for the Paris showpiece shorten to 6/1, down from pre-race odds of 12/1. However, she is not yet entered in the Arc, and her participation may depend on the going. On quick ground, Minnie Hauk may earn a late supplementary entry. However, if the ground is on the softer side – as tends to be the case in Paris in October – Minnie Hauk is more likely to head stateside, leaving stablemate Whirl to chase Arc glory.
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