Irish Champion Stakes preview: Luxembourg can belie his odds

3.25 Leopardstown Royal Bahrain Irish Champion Stakes (Group One) 1m2f

Since its inception in 1976, the Irish Champion Stakes has assumed the mantle as the most prestigious Flat race on the Irish calendar and regularly features as one of the highest rated contests anywhere on the planet.

Leopardstown hosted two of the great duels of the 21st Century, with the late bloomer Fantastic Light emerging victorious as a five-year-old when he clashed with Derby winner and future supersire Galileo in a race for the ages in 2001.

Just two years later, High Chaparral repelled the late thrusts of Falbrav and Islington in a stacked race at the Foxrock venue.

Dylan Thomas became the first two-time winner of the race after victories in 2006 and 2007, a feat subsequently matched by the mare Magical in 2019 and 2020, while the Sea The Stars can arguably lay claim to the greatest individual performance in the race during his unbeaten Classic campaign in 2009.

However, the quality of the fields and the winners have naturally oscillated over the years. They can't all be vintage editions or that would render them unexceptional.

The absence of the City Of Troy and Calandagan, who proved the best when finishing first and second in last month’s Juddmonte International at York, does strip the race of some of its lustre.

City Of Troy is being prepared for November's Breeders’ Cup Classic at Del Mar, the San Diego County beach town that’s racecourse is famously known as the place where 'the surf, meets the turf’, even if it’s an alien dirt surface that Aidan O’Brien’s charge will tackle for the first time.

Calandagan, who may have been given too much to do in reeling in City Of Troy at York, waits for Ascot’s Champion Stakes in October, a track where he