Tag Archive for: Prix Du Jockey Club

Monday Musings: Now I’ve Seen Everything

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Finally, after more than 70 years of watching horse racing, I can honestly say I’ve seen everything, writes Tony Stafford.

We’ve been used to witnessing Aidan O’Brien horses filling the first three positions in Classic races maybe not that frequently. It happens enough not to be a total surprise when it does. Never, though, I venture, have we seen anything to match the stage management that led to yesterday’s clean sweep in the Prix du Jockey-Club (French Derby) at Chantilly.

Aidan’s trio finished the right way round in the end as favourite Constitution River, yes over there rather than at Epsom on Saturday in the “real” Derby, under a sublime Ryan Moore, edged out Hawk Mountain and Christophe Soumillon, with outsider Montreal, on their heels in third under an inspired ride from the front by reliable number two Wayne Lordan.

I wonder how many of the Ballydoyle entourage bothered or even thought to risk a little on the Tricast on the Pari-Mutuel. It paid €167.55 for a €1 stake!

Sixteen horses turned out for this 10.5 furlongs with Ryan drawn widest bar-one in 15, a position reckoned by many experts impossible from which to win. Those experts, including the extremely experienced Sky Sports Racing team on scene, reckoned Ryan would have to “drop in” to overcome the disadvantageous position.

Instead, he “dropped out” widest of all in clear isolation in the early running as Lordan from the middle aimed and effected a fast break to get to the inside. Soumillon was soon at the head of the big group up the middle, and you could understand the enormity of the favourite’s task as Constitution River was needing plenty of encouragement throughout the entire race as he was so wide as the turns unfolded.

By the time they had straightened for home, the Ballydoyle trio had worked their way into the podium places as Karl Burke’s Hankelow, echoing his prominent role in the French 2,000 Guineas, started to flag. He had finished a close third over the mile at Longchamp behind St James’s Palace-bound Rayif and yesterday’s rival Komorebi.

The stock of that race took a dive yesterday, Komorebi finishing only tenth and Burke’s horse fading away to 13th.

Winding up for the final thrust a furlong from home, the three Coolmore colts were in a line. If anything, you were wondering, certainly I was, whether Montreal was going to spring the shock. Hawk Mountain, winner of last year’s Futurity at Doncaster where he beat next Saturday’s Epsom race favourite Benvenuto Cellini, was also fully extended, but Ryan was the one with the most resources at his disposal.

It wasn’t until the last 75 yards that the result was etched on the trophy with Michael Tabor’s blue edging out Derrick Smith’s purple, Sue Magnier’s second pink silks gracing the third home. That the final margin had stretched to threequarters of a length at the line suggested strongly that Constitution River would have had a favourite’s chance over another furlong and a half at Epsom had he been sent there.

For years, we’ve had the supreme hurdler turned nine-year-old embryo flat performer Constitution Hill as the most popular racehorse. Maybe Constitution River will do enough in his career to give pause for thought. The world as they say, is his – you know what.

And as if the O’Brien family didn’t have enough to celebrate yesterday, out of the pack into fourth came A Boy Named Susie. His trainer? None other than Aidan and Anne-Marie O’Brien’s younger son Donnacha and owned by his (Donnacha’s) sister Ana, no mean jockey herself until injury curtailed her career.

Yesterday’s winner and runner-up were among the 22 left in the Betfred Derby at the latest stage. The already humbled French – don’t fret mes chers, the English team were similarly blown away – do not have a single horse standing in the Classic unless connections wish to put up the requisite supplementary fee of £90,000 by noon today.

To recoup that, your horse would have to finish in the first four of the £1 million to the winner, and £2 million total, contest. Prizes for the Betfred Derby dribble down to tenth, almost in the way of the sales races for two-year-olds, but from a fittingly more handsome starting point.

The best that the home team could muster yesterday was the 37 grand picked up by fifth-home Alam. Aidan will be credited with £1.2 million in the French trainers’ prizemoney list or rather €1.37 million and the winner’s €857k (or if you prefer £745,000) will swell by another €282k as he is French-bred, while his stablemates are not. I wondered why they decided to go there!

Ana O’Brien’s 74 grand is likely to be swamped by what she can expect to field in offers for her colt from the ever-ravenous Australian stables who have so much money to spend.

As my old pal Lew Day told me the other week, he retained a half-share in his horse Raheen House when he went to race in Australia, there were maybe a hundred joint-owners sharing the other half, a worthwhile punt if you have the prizemoney to offer as they do.

I guess it’s possible there might be a supplementary entry or two, although whether anyone will be daring enough after this O’Brien 1-2-3 is debatable.

Suppose the bare 20 all stay in, that would mean ten for the home team including smart pair Item (Andrew Balding) and Maltese Cross (William Haggas) and again ten from Ireland, eight from Aidan and two trained by his elder son Joseph, including James J Braddock which got up late to beat Aidan’s Pierre Bonnard in the Cashel Palace Hotel Derby Trial at Leopardstown last time.

James J Braddock already has part Australian ownership, a group having acquired a share from noted Irish media expert (and Joseph advisor) Kevin Blake. Joseph bought the son of Zarak as a yearling for 40,000gns. His stud fee in France this year was €80k, so some bargain, never mind what he has already collected for his now part-owner. A share of the £1 million would still do nicely.

Benvenuto Cellini is now 2/1 best to make it 12 Derby wins for O’Brien and 13 for Michael Tabor. Item is only 4/1 now after that smooth Dante win at York, with Pierre Bonnard and Lingfield trial winner Maltese Cross coming next.

With the money after the winner standing at £400k; £200k; £130k; £80k; £50k; £35k; £30k; £25k and £20k, I wonder if we will see a Michael Dickinson-type domination on Saturday? Could the Famous Five of the 1983 Cheltenham Gold Cup be usurped by a Superb Six, a Superlative Seven of even an Extraordinary Eight? Probably not, and for the home trainers with hopes of winning the most important prize in the calendar, let’s hope it doesn’t happen.

I’m sure that Saturday’s revelation of the 16 six-day acceptors (four supplementary) for Friday’s Oaks at Epsom brought the chill of dread to the Editor with Precise poised to line up with/against Amelia Earhart depending on your point of view.

Does the stretching-out to 1m4f for the first time of an ultra-impressive Guineas-winning filly trump the emphatic Cheshire Oaks-winning form at just a half-furlong or so short of the Classic trip of her stablemate?

It might not even be a case of whether Ryan Moore or Wayne Lordan rides which of the pair. Lordan rode True Love to win the 1,000 Guineas as Moore on Precise was a sleepy seventh. At the Curragh, a rejuvenated, if you can call it that after one run off a setback, Precise with Lordan up, slaughtered her old rival, now under Ryan, with the finishing speed of a true champion.

He’s done it successfully before, but will Aidan want to test his belief that Precise will stay another four furlongs so soon after the Curragh against the certainty of knowing she would be the one to beat if turning up for the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot? Nervy times – as I said, depending on your point of view.

What yesterday in Chantilly told us, is that even after all this time, Aidan O’Brien is getting better every year in his role as custodian of the Coolmore breeding operation. I’ll never again subscribe to the view that anything he attempts is unlikely to happen.

- TS

Monday Musings: Crown King for a Day?

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Things move along rapidly in life in the 21st Century even if a certain English monarch has shown plenty of stickability, writes Tony Stafford. In the Coolmore box on Saturday after the authoritative triumph by Desert Crown in the Cazoo Derby, the main players were adamant we had all witnessed a superstar – one that might go all the way.

Even in his interview after the race, Sir Michael Stoute felt emboldened enough to declare him “promising”. Maybe he was saying, “seen it all before”, and I suppose he had all those years ago in Shergar, but promising? Hardly.

Maybe he was talking about his jockey. You would never have thought Richard Kingscote was having only his second mount in the race in a large field where more experienced big-race riders could easily have got caught up in the inevitable Epsom traffic that can envelop them on the wrong day.

But Kingscote, untroubled, could just as easily have been riding on a Friday evening at Haydock or Chester, the two tracks where he had best showcased his talents in the years he spent riding for the Tom Dascombe stable until Michael Owen’s mid-winter shake-up.

You need luck in this game. Sir Michael Stoute has never been a man in his half-century as a trainer to change his stable jockeys unduly, but Ryan Moore’s progressive unavailability with his Ballydoyle commitments meant there needed to be an available back-up.

In the past, Frankie Dettori might have been a contender for drafting in with Moore cemented to Coolmore, but Kingscote had moved south after leaving Manor House Stables and must have impressed Desert Crown’s trainer that he would do very nicely when he showed up to ride out at Freemason Lodge.

The son of Nathaniel, who before York had raced only once in a maiden at Nottingham last November, was obviously very talented. His trainer, though, was unsure whether Desert Crown could be readied in time for the Dante. Fortunately he was and Kingscote was on board, looking the part as they strolled home in what history has told us is always the best Derby trial.

All that was left was to beat the Godolphins and the Coolmores on Saturday, and this they did with panache, coming down the straight with a surge that took them past Moore and Stone Age as the Aidan O’Brien first string was battling to take control.

The consensus in the box afterwards was that Stone Age didn’t stay, along with a recognition that it would not have mattered if he had. The winner was supreme. It was going to take something special, they thought, to beat him.

That view held until mid-afternoon yesterday and, as is often the case when Coolmore don’t have the winner of a Classic, they still have more than a little to do with the breeding and production of it.

Step forward Vadeni, who swamped the front-running Modern Times for speed and drew effortlessly away in the last furlong of the Qatar Prix du Jockey-Club at Chantilly. He won by five lengths, avenging a defeat in a Group 3 on the track last September when third to James Ferguson’s El Bodegan. That colt battled on well to pip Modern Times for the runner-up spot.

The consolation for the Coolmore partners is that the winner was the result of an outsourcing by his breeder the Aga Khan, who sent Vadeni’s mother, Vaderami (an unraced daughter of the German stallion Monsun), to be one of the first group of mares to visit Churchill.

The quest is always how to replace – or in their wildest dreams – replicate Galileo. They’ve always thought Churchill was his quickest Classic son as the champion juvenile of his year and easy winner of both the Newmarket and Curragh 2,000 Guineas.

Having gone into this weekend as the sire of two Group 3 winners, Churchill now has a five-length winner of a Classic in a field of 15 where runner-up and third had already won at Group 1 level.

Churchill is, on a lower plane, the sire of one of my favourite handicappers, Brian Meehan’s Lawful Command, who has all the courage of his wonderful grandsire. That colt will keep on winning handicaps, but I bet Sam Sangster, who bought Lawful Command, will already be resigned that his yearlings will be priced out of most mortals’ budgets this autumn with the stud fee doing a similar exponential jump as Galileo’s did when his first three-year-olds began flexing their Classic muscles almost two decades ago. Not even his passing has stopped them twitching away!

I mentioned last week when discussing Desert Crown, that he might not have been the most obvious contender for winning a Derby. Not all products of Nathaniel, Frankel’s contemporary and three-quarter-length debut victim to the unbeaten champion, are high-class. Both colts of course were by Galileo, and Nathaniel will always be remembered as sire of the 21st Century’s best race-mare, Enable. He has been a great servant to Newsells Park Stud in Hertfordshire and Gary Coffee and Julian Dollar have every right in declaring him a steal at £15k too!

Desert Crown may well aspire to similar heights as Enable. There have been many examples of Michael Stoute horses developing from ordinary performers in their three-year-old season to international champions, like Singspiel and Pilsudski all those years ago. When they start out good, they rarely disappoint.

Sir Michael must still hanker after the days when he trained horses of the calibre of Shergar for the Aga Khan, but His Highness’s horses have for many years been centred in France and Ireland for racing and breeding. Long-term stud operations cannot be carried on at full effectiveness without regular injections of new talent and, on the day Churchill offered fresh impetus for Coolmore, the Aga Khan Studs unveiled their latest trump card.

There were three Aga Khan winners yesterday and, rather like the perfect Harry Kane hat-trick (left-foot, right-foot and a header – that’s for you Your Majesty, sorry about yesterday!) – they offered a bright vision of the future.

First in the 12f fillies’ Group 3, the Prix de Royaumont, Christophe Soumillon brought Baiykara, only second best in the market, with an irresistible run which provided a step-by-step dress rehearsal for their Classic show a little later on.

The extent of Vadeni’s success over ten-and-a -half furlongs had been even less anticipated than the filly’s win. You got the impression from winning trainer Jean-Claude Rouget that he might be thinking less about Longchamp in October for Valeni than Leopardstown the previous month. That was probably in line with Soumillon’s earlier murmurings about the Arc for Baiykara.

“I love that race, <the Irish Champion Stakes>”, said Rouget, who has now won five Jockey-Clubs and four of the last seven. Some people in racing seem to think this is the “cheaper” alternative to Epsom and, while Rouget will not hold that view, he did concede that there have been some less than top winners of the Chantilly race along with stars like last year’s hero and European Champion, St Mark’s Basilica. Then again, not every Epsom Derby winner enters the sport’s pantheon either.

The third Aga Khan winner, almost bizarrely, was a sprinter, although in the year when the Aga Khan studs are celebrating the 100 years since the colours of his grandfather, also the Aga Khan, were first seen on a racecourse. That year he bought the flying speckled grey filly Mumtaz Mahal and as well as proving a great racehorse herself, she appears in many of today’s pedigrees, often through her descendant Nasrullah.

Yesterday’s sprint winner was Rozgar, easy winner of the six-furlong Listed race, and while out of an Aga Khan-bred daughter of Sea The Stars, she is by the Darley sprint sire, Exceed and Excel.

Returning though to Baiykara, she is from the first crop of Zarak, a beautifully-bred young stallion, coincidentally listed in 2022’s brochure from the Aga Khan’s French stud, the Haras de Bonneval, at the same fee as Churchill, €25,000.

By Dubawi out of the unbeaten champion mare Zarkava, he did not quite live up to his exemplary breeding, but one of his four wins in 13 starts was at Group 1 level – the Grand Prix De Saint-Cloud and he did just nudge the €1 million prize mark.

Zarak also had something to say later in the card, providing a cross-Channel win for the William Haggas stable.  This was Purplepay, a filly bought by his long-time clients Lael Stable at last December’s Arqana sale for €2 milllion.

That price would never have been countenanced in the first half of last year, even though she was prolific in the provinces, but she upped the ante for her last two runs and picked up a Longchamp conditions race before running third in a Saint-Cloud Group 1.

Fittingly, on the weekend when the 2022 Derby was run in Lester’s honour, his American friends Lael Stable, with whom he owned shares in Haggas horses, now have a very smart filly with his son-in-law.

As probably the trainer closest to the Sir Michael Stoute tradition of steadily bringing on his young horses, he can take this explosive filly a long way, perhaps starting at Royal Ascot next week. Yes, we’ve got that to come, in just eight days’ time. Chantilly was only one day after a wonderful Derby performance but, as we’ve seen, things in racing rarely stand still for long.

- TS

Monday Musings: The Middle Distance Ranks Are Massing

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Until Wednesday evening in Paris it was all plain sailing for Aidan O’Brien, writes Tony Stafford. He could pick his Group 1 spots for the rest of the year with his team of Classic colts and more plentiful top fillies and wait to see what presumably ineffectual opposition Europe’s other major stables would be able to throw at them.

But then along came Hurricane Lane, only third to lesser-fancied stable-companion Adayar in the Derby at Epsom but subsequently a workmanlike winner in the face of a good late challenge by English-trained Lone Eagle (Martin Meade) in the Irish Derby at The Curragh.

Neither run could have prepared us for the Frankel colt’s storming performance on Bastille Day (14 July) as he ripped away the home team’s barricades <couldn’t help myself> beating the Prix du Jockey Club also-rans with possibly more ease than St Mark’s Basilica had managed a month earlier.

Die-hard traditionalists have already been put in their place in France. In the old days the Jockey Club was 2400 metres (12 furlongs) in line with Epsom and The Curragh and was reduced to its present distance of 2100 metres in 2005.

That move coincided with the moving up to a mile and a half of the great Fête Nationale celebration race on a movable feast of an evening card at Longchamp. The Grand Prix de Paris, until the arrival of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1920, had been the most prestigious and valuable race in France and was run over 3000 metres (15 furlongs), and even 3100 metres for a shorter intervening period.

In 1987, though, it was reduced significantly in distance to 2000 metres (1m2f) and it was at that trip that Saumarez won the 1990 race prior to his victory in the Arc that October. Previously trained to place in the Dee Stakes at Chester by Henry Cecil, Saumarez made Nicolas Clement, who had recently taken over the stable when his father Miguel died, the youngest-ever trainer to win France’s greatest race.

It works for France because, as Hurricane Lane showed so eloquently, a horse could run in and even win either or both the Epsom and Irish Derby, or indeed the Jockey Club, and there would still be time to prepare him for the Grand Prix.

That is just what Charlie Appleby did with such skill and the most notable element of it was how much he had in hand of the William Haggas colt Alenquer whose form with Adayer in the Sandown Classic Trial over ten furlongs in the spring appeared to give him a collateral edge on Hurricane Lane.

Alenquer not only beat Adayer on the Esher slopes but afterwards comfortably won the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot. But he was put in his place as Hurricane Lane stormed <that verb again!> six lengths clear of Wordsworth, first home of the O’Brien trio. It looked at first appraisal a major improvement on The Curragh but closer inspection reveals that Wordsworth had been beaten slightly further in his home Classic.

So where does that leave Adayer? Well, according to a conversation Charlie Appleby had with a friend who visited his luxurious stables in Newmarket before racing on Saturday, Adayer is fancied to run a very strong race as he faces up to last year’s O’Brien Classic superstar, Love, in Saturday’s King George.

The filly has the edge in the market after her comeback win over an inadequate ten furlongs in the Prince Of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot but Appleby, mindful that the weight-for-age scale favours three-year-olds, is by all accounts confident he will do so. Love concedes 8lb to the Derby hero while William Muir and Chris Grassick’s Coronation Cup hero Pyledriver gives him 11lb. Ascot is also the probable target for Lone Eagle.

Like O’Brien, Appleby is a modest man who often deflects praise to the people around him. Indeed as my friend left, Charlie said, “If you couldn’t train horses from here, where could you?”

Guesses that maybe St Mark’s Basilica might step up in distance on Saturday have been scuppered by his trainer’s single-mindedly pointing him towards the Juddmonte International. Those three days in York next month will also feature the next step towards the stars of Snowfall, following in the footprints of Love from a year ago by taking in the Yorkshire Oaks.

By the way, Jim, get my room ready! I’ll see how my first day back racing on Saturday at Ascot goes and then I might take the liberty of giving you a call. Where have I been? Too busy with all this Covid lark, mate, but I have been thinking of you!

However short a price Love was on what was to prove her last run of 2020 after the easy wins in the 1,000 Guineas and Oaks, the latter by nine lengths, 4-9 will be looking a gift if that is available about Snowfall. Could be 1-5!

Many felt the exaggerated superiority, indeed a UK Classic record-winning margin of 16 lengths, could in part be ascribed to the very testing ground at Epsom. Just as many were predicting that on faster ground in Saturday’s Irish Oaks she might go for economy.

Leading two furlongs out under Ryan Moore, delighted to be riding her for only the second time – he was on board for the shock Musidora win at York on May 12 three weeks before Epsom and that Frankie Dettori benefit – she drew away by eight-and-a-half lengths in majestic style.

As we know, the Coolmore boys like all the boxes ticked and the opportunities covered, but I can categorically tell you that they did not expect her to win at York. Even when she did, the beaten horses’ connections were dreaming up reasons why you could not trust the result.

After all she was rated only a modest 90 on the back of her juvenile exploits, the most memorable apart from winning a small maiden race was the mix up when she wore the wrong colour hat when well behind in the Fillies’ Mile at Newmarket last autumn.

After the Epsom and Curragh regal processions there is only one place you would consider for a soft-ground loving but equally comfortable on quicker turf three-year-old filly of her status - the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. It took me a while – having discarded my European Pattern Races 2021 book with hundreds of others in advance of a hoped-for downsizing move – to work out why she had not been one of the dozen O’Brien horses entered for the Arc.

Six older male horses – Mogul, Broome, Armory, Serpentine, Japan and Inisfree (where’s he been for 20 months?) – are supplemented by Love. The five three-year-olds are the colts St Mark’s Basilica, along with domestic Classic flops Bolshoi Ballet, High Definition and hard-working Van Gogh whose dance in four Classics (the UK and Irish Guineas, when third behind Mac Swiney, and French and Irish Derby) brought that one positive result.

That left room for one filly and, considering Santa Barbara took until last week to gain Grade 1 winning honours in the New York Oaks while four of her supposedly inferior female counterparts beat her to it, the evidence is there. They did indeed think she was far and away the best.

At least that was the case until 3.15 p.m. on the afternoon of May 12. The Arc closed at France Galop’s HQ around four-and-three-quarter hours earlier.  Now they have to wait until September 27 to get her in and pay a heavy penalty to do so.

In all, 101 horses made it. I am sure that date is writ large on the Racing Office wall and, if she enjoys another exhibition round back at the Yorkshire track she first consented to tell her trainer and owners how good she is, the supplementary entry will be made. Chances to win the race do not come along very often.

For all his and his owners’ successes in big races around Europe and in the US, the Arc has proved elusive. Two victories, with four-year-olds Dylan Thomas in 2007 and the brilliant filly Found five years ago, leave him still with a blank to fill. No Ballydoyle three-year-old has won the race since the days of Vincent O’Brien, who took the first of his two Arcs with Alleged in 1977. His second win, doubling up for Lester Piggott the year after followed Ballymoss in 1958, showed once again just how tough a race it is to win.

As mentioned, two O’Brien fillies are entered, Love and Santa Barbara. The latter might continue to make up for her earlier limitations in the Nassau Stakes next week but, as we know, a trio of Classic-winning alternatives, Joan Of Arc, Mother Earth and Empress Josephine, are equally qualified to step in and possibly pick up the Goodwood fillies’ Group 1.

Meanwhile Kevin Ryan has been exploiting the early juvenile Group contests in France with Atomic Force. Beaten first time out and gelded before a win in a small race at Hamilton, Ryan took him to Longchamp last month and he won Group 3 Prix du Bois nicely.

Returning yesterday for the Group 2 Prix Robert Papin, he started 2-1 on and bolted up. He will probably return for the Prix Morny at Deauville next month. Having watched that win the Sky Sports Racing team suggested the Nunthorpe might be an option given how much weight juveniles get from their elders. This year though that could be a hot race if newcomers on the Group 1 sprinting scene like Ed Walker’s Starman and Tim Easterby’s flying filly Winter Power turn up.

- TS