Lake Victoria crowned top juvenile filly following stellar campaign

Aidan O’Brien is eyeing Classic glory with the unbeaten Lake Victoria after she was confirmed as the Champion European Two-Year-Old Filly for 2024.

The daughter of Frankel rattled off five straight victories as a juvenile, the last three of which came at Grade One level over a trio of different distances.

Having claimed the Moyglare Stud Stakes over seven furlongs at the Curragh, she dropped back to six for Newmarket’s Cheveley Park and then closed her campaign with victory in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf over a mile at Del Mar.

A rating of 119 put her second to Godolphin colt Shadow Of Light (120) in the overall standings and only Minding has managed a higher rating from O’Brien’s eight past winners in the leading filly category.

The Ballydoyle handler said: “What she did was very unusual, you couldn’t really believe that a two-year-old filly would do that – to win all three Group Ones over three different distances.

“She’s obviously quick and she got a mile well in America the last day. You’d imagine that she’s going to be a miler-type and might get a mile and a quarter.

“She’s by Frankel and out of Quiet Reflection, who was very quick, but she’s big, she’s powerful and has a great mind, plus a great constitution.

“She was obviously going through her races very easily and doing her work very easily. If you see her in a race, she travels very well and when she quickens, she puts a lot of her races to bed.

“But obviously she has a lot of class, that’s what she has and it made her very different.”

Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board handicapper Mark Bird said: “Lake Victoria created her own piece of history on the way to emerging as the Champion European Two-Year-Old Filly for 2024 by becoming the only champion filly in the history of the classifications to win three Group/Grade One races at the age of two.

“Almost as remarkable, the daughter of Frankel recorded top-level wins at six furlongs, seven furlongs and a mile, as well as in three different countries.

“She matches the feat previously only achieved this century by Found (2014) in becoming the outright two-year-old Champion ahead of the colts in her native Ireland, a country which this year had the highest number of horses on the Two-Year-Old Classification for the first time ever.”

The leading juvenile filly in Britain was Godolphin’s Desert Flower, who achieved a rating of 117 following an unbeaten campaign that ended with a five-and-a-half-length success in the Fillies’ Mile at Newmarket.

Her trainer Charlie Appleby said: “She’s won over a mile already and she’s a filly I’d imagine going straight to the Guineas with. Obviously we’ve got a few months to see how she progresses, but she’s done very well over the winter and I’m very pleased with her.

“I’m sometimes a fan of going straight into the Guineas without a prep and just timing-wise it suits us better. I feel we’re getting these horses fit enough and it’s a long season ahead of them.

“Will she be a likely Oaks filly? I don’t know if I see her stretching out that far, although on her running style, I think she’d give herself a chance of getting that trip, but for the foreseeable future we’ll stick to a mile and our target is very much the Guineas.”