Murtagh ensures Rip van Winkle puts Prince's dream to bed

One of the great supporters of the sport in general, and York in particular, seemed set to celebrate another highlight of a golden summer – then Johnny Murtagh turned up late and the happy ending was no more.

Prince Khalid Abdullah already has a sheaf of Group One prizes – including the Derby with Workforce – under his arm after months of almost unbroken success and it seemed certain that the Juddmonte International would at last fall to the man who has sponsored York's richest race for 22 years.

Everything had gone according to script; his two quality colts Twice Over and Byword, the former trained by Henry Cecil, the latter in France by Andre Fabre, had paced themselves beautifully and when Byword hit the front with Twice Over his only possible rival the race appeared over.

The Abdullah pair settled to slug out the final two furlongs and Twice Over had just edged ahead when the crowd suddenly saw the danger that Tom Queally and Maxime Guyon could never have expected as they fought their apparently private duel.

Rip Van Winkle, the enigma from Ballydoyle, had been given a sunlit cruise round eight of the International's 10 furlongs, Murtagh sitting him just behind Twice Over for the first mile and switching him off.

It was all a cunning plot, devised by the master of Ballydoyle himself, Aidan O'Brien. It took barely a shake of the reins for Rip Van Winkle to stir himself, flash through the gears and in a matter of strides appear as a real threat to the two leaders, closing the gap with a blistering surge.

Suddenly he was upsides and the Abdullah pair appeared to be standing still, so fast did the Irish hope power past them to send those who had taken the skinny odds of 7-4 into soaring bellows of delight.

Murtagh and O'Brien, typically, were more reserved. The jubilant jockey purred: "He's a great horse, he comes through anything. Aidan had a plan this year, he was going to take him off slow; there's a lot of big races coming up for him at the end of the year and we want to have him fresh and well."

O'Brien himself did not accept that Rip Van Winkle might be even better over another two furlongs – perhaps in the Arc. "He's got a lot of speed so we won't need to try him over further," he said.

"They didn't go very fast and we were just looking to see him relax, that was the important thing. He's in a good place and really on an upward curve."

It was a profitable afternoon for the Irish pair, the richest race in York's history rewarded the winning connections with over 393,000 while the Prince had to make do with taking home 225,000 of his own money; he would have preferred the fairytale.