IT was classic trials day at ParisLongchamp last Sunday and, while the rain that changed the ground to ‘holding’ deprived the card of the participation of the card’s most interesting runner in terms of an Irish audience in the shape of Victoria Road, the locals were more interested in their own champion two-year-old, Blue Rose Cen. They must have been happy with what they saw.
Christopher Head’s Churchill filly could barely have done more to enhance her credentials for the Poule d’Essai des Pouliches in three weeks’ time. Making the running in the Group 3 Prix de la Grotte over the full mile of the Pouliches, despite not having performed that role in any of her three most impressive juvenile performances, she extended her lead to three lengths approaching the furlong marker and was able to coast home to score by a comfortable length and a quarter.
Head, who has begun the campaign in superb form having landed another big trial with Big Rock at the same venue a week earlier, reacted: “It’s even more pleasing that she was able to do it the hard way from the front. I still feel that there is more to come – she was taking on rivals who have already had an outing and it’s simply not possible to gain the same benefit from anything you do at home. She certainly wasn’t 100% today yet she still won without needing to be subjected to a hard race.”
Possible Curragh target
With Victoria Road absent, the colts’ equivalent - the Group 3 Prix de Fontainebleau - was run in a marginally quicker time 35 minutes earlier and witnessed a high class performance from American Flag, a €102,000 Arqana yearling purchase who runs in the colours of Malcolm Parrish and looks like he might enable his Deauville trainer Yann Barberot to graduate to the big league.
After sitting in last in a reduced field of five, Christophe Soumillon unleased American Flag down the outside halfway up the home straight and his mount responded so positively that the partnership was two and a half lengths clear of Marhaba Ya Sanafi at the line. Despite the protestations of Jean-Claude Rouget that his charge, third-placed Rajapour, will be a totally different proposition on Poule d’Essai des Poulains day compared with for this seasonal debut, it is hard to imagine the placings being reversed.
However, if Parrish get his way, American Flag’s next big target could be the Irish 2000 Guineas while Barberot sees him as more of a Prix du Jockey Club contender. Soumillon was in no doubt about the quality of this performance, saying: “It’s a long time since I’ve ridden a three-year-old colt as good as him, he’s a Group 1 horse.”
Another potential leading Jockey Club contender is Flight Leader, who took a while to engage top gear but stayed on strongly at the end of the 10-and-a-half-furlong Group 3 Prix Noailles to score by a short neck. Trainer Andre Fabre has long thought a lot of this Juddmonte home-bred Frankel colt. Aidan O’Brien’s Londoner posted a solid if unspectacular reappearance to be beaten a length and a quarter into fourth place.
THE spotlight moved to Chantilly on Monday for the five-and-a-half-furlong Prix de Sigy and the result here suggested that France may be short of three-year-old sprinting talent again this year.
The two foreign visitors came home four lengths clear of the home contingent with Karl Burke’s Marshman proving a length and a quarter too strong for the Donnacha O’Brien-trained Wodao.
Burke has often tried to plunder this event since it was awarded Group 3 status in 2015, and though he won it at the first attempt with the subsequent Group 1 heroine Quiet Reflection in 2016, none of his four runners since have made the top three.
“Marshman ran some good races last season even if he did disappoint when we upped him to a Group 1 – that was clearly a race too far at the end of a long season,” Burke said.
“After a difficult six weeks my horses seem to be getting back to form now and you will probably next see this fellow in the Sandy Lane Stakes at Haydock.”