ALMOST 27,000 were in attendance at Chantilly last Sunday to witness the crowning moment of Francis Graffard’s training career as the Nathaniel filly Channel gave him his first classic triumph in the Group 1 Prix de Diane.

This 10-and-a-half furlong €1 million fillies’ contest was an unsatisfactory affair with regards to pace which was slow early and led to just four and a half lengths covering the first dozen across the line.

The 42-year-old trainer won’t care too much about that as everything went perfectly for Channel, an inexperienced filly who was able to take advantage of her low draw to gain a handy position in behind the leaders and took her chance once a gap opened for her at the ideal moment early in the straight.

Quickening up well, she kept going gamely in the last 100 yards to hold off the late thrust of Commes by a head with an outsider, Grand Glory, finishing best of all to snatch third, another half length adrift, and the hot-favourite, Siyarafina, beaten little more than a length in sixth.

Bred and raised at Kilcarn Stud in Co Meath, Channel was sold for just €18,000 at Goffs Orby Yearling Sales in September 2017 before she fetched €70,000 as a breeze-up at Arqana eight months later.

Unraced until the end of March, she is one of just two horses in training owned by Samuel de Barros, whose wife, Elodie, breeds trotting horses at the Haras des Authieux in Normandy.

Her path to the Diane was a little unconventional, encompassing a maiden win at Lyon Parilly (the same course Graffard introduced his first Group 1 winner Erupt) prior to gaining Chantilly match practice when landing the same course-and-distance conditions race that West Wind used as a springboard to Diane success 12 years previously.

The win moved Graffard into an unprecedented fourth place in the French trainers’ championship and meant even more to him as it came in combination with jockey Pierre-Charles Boudot, whose late father, Marc, gave Graffard his first taste of racing, riding out in the mornings for him at his local track of Paray-le-Monial in the east of France, not too far from Geneva.

Usually very well turned out and measured when you see him on a racecourse, he rather lost himself in the ecstasy of victory, vaulting the running rail and losing his sunglasses in his haste to congratulate horse and rider.

Once reunited with his filly, Boudot greeted him with a heartfelt, ‘Allez Paray-le-Monial!’ and Graffard, quite understandably and rather touchingly, was unable to control his emotions when a television microphone was thrust in his direction, some fruity language demonstrating the strength of his feeling.

“My mother was not very happy with me,” he admitted sheepishly the following day.

Less than eight years on since he first took out a training licence in Chantilly, he is a fantastic advertisement for Sheikh Mohammed’s Darley Flying Start training scheme which helps young people from around the globe gain a foothold in the racing industry.

He was part of its initial intake in 2003 and it was on the course that he met his Irish future wife, Lisa-Jane Moeran, now Godolphin’s French racing manager.

Plans for the winner remain fluid, other than a summer holiday. The Prix de l’Arc de Tiomphe is an obvious target, but she would need to be supplemented.

Of the beaten horses, one had to feel sympathy for connections of the runner-up, the Jean-Claude Rouget-trained Commes, who was denied a clear passage for a brief moment in the home straight – only a small incident but maybe enough to make the difference between success and failure.

She has now been the bridesmaid in two classics as she also lost out by a nose in the Poule d’Essai des Pouliches.