Two Derby winners in eleven years is obviously "pathetic" in the worlds greatest race...dear God...objectivity is patently in short supply with such off the cuff and indeed "pathetic" utterances ... Your lack of love for Coolmore is not in doubt QM,but should be tempered with a degree of rationality.
Dexter, you have obviously counted how many runners Aidan O'Brien has had in the Derby in his career. If your horses comprise almost a quarter of all the runners, then a fourteen percent strike rate is pathetic, compared to the twenty-one percent strike rate of Sir Michael Stoute, who only has six percent of runners.
Since Aidan O'Brien's first Derby runner in 1998, the facts are:
1998 - 15 ran (AOB=3, SMS=1)
1999 - 16 ran (AOB=1, SMS=1)
2000 - 15 ran (AOB=1, SMS=0)
2001 - 12 ran (AOB=1, SMS=2) GALILEO 11/4
2002 - 12 ran (AOB=3, SMS=0) HIGH CHAPARRAL 7/2
2003 - 20 ran (AOB=4, SMS=1) KRIS KIN 6/1
2004 - 14 ran (AOB=1, SMS=1) NORTH LIGHT 7/2
2005 - 13 ran (AOB=4, SMS=0)
2006 - 18 ran (AOB=4, SMS=2)
2007 - 17 ran (AOB=8, SMS=0)
2008 - 16 ran (AOB=5, SMS=3)
2009 - 12 ran (AOB=6, SMS=0)
2010 - 12 ran (AOB=3, SMS=1) WORKFORCE 6/1
2011 - 13 ran (AOB=4, SMS=1)
Follow Aidan O'Brien to a level stake at Epsom and you would be losing £39.75 while Sir Michael Stoute would give you a £5.50 profit.
I am making a perfectly rational argument based on publicly available statistics. If you gave Sir Michael Stoute the horses that Aidan O'Brien has had at his disposal this century, he would have achieved much better results because he would not simply run all of them in every race in the hope that one of them would win.
I am not disputing that some of the horses have turned out to be very good (if not Derby winners), but how many horses that could have been good have been sacrificed?