2023 was the year when the French flat racing fraternity fought back.

After a period of underachievement, when so many of the top domestic races were being systematically picked off by foreign horses, all five classics were retained as was the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe – the holy grail of its home nation and, indeed, the entire continent.

Having managed to successfully defend little more than a quarter of their Group 1 prizes over the previous two seasons, French-trained horses landed 10 of the first 12 Group 1s of 2023 and ended the year with 16 top level victories against the 12 enjoyed by overseas challengers.

France produced not just the world’s best three-year-old in Ace Impact but two more exceptional members of that generation, Blue Rose Cen and Big Rock, who both hailed from the relatively small string of rookie trainer Christopher Head and were both owned and bred by the little-known Spaniard Leopoldo Fernandez Pujals.

While Blue Rose Cen, an Irish-bred daughter of Churchill, was well known to fans this time last year, thanks to her scintillating 2022 Prix Marcel Boussac romp, the other two superstars of the classic crop both had highly unconventional starts to their competitive careers.

Low-key success

The Jean-Claude Rouget-trained Ace Impact was still a month away from his initial public appearance last December, and when he did grace a racecourse for the first time it was for a low-key success at Cagnes-sur-Mer one Thursday lunchtime.

His second start, nine weeks later, was equally anonymous, in Bordeaux one Sunday afternoon less than an hour after the French Grand National had been run up in Paris.

Big Rock debuted some 13 months ago at Fontainebleau and then kept going right through the winter and spring, having one start per month all the way through until June. Though always in the ‘royal blue with white seams’ of Pujals’s Yeguada Centurion, the Rock Of Gibraltar colt did not even join Head until just before he lost his maiden tag at the fourth attempt in a modest Chantilly all-weather handicap in mid-February.

The unbeaten Arc hero Ace Impact made the biggest impact of the pair, adopting a spine-tingling come-from-behind style of racing that saw him give the leaders (namely Big Rock, in the case of the Prix du Jockey Club) a massive head start before coming with an irresistible sustained burst of speed down the outside in the finishing straight.

Yet Big Rock was almost as thrilling with his catch-me-if-you-can tactics that yielded two pattern victories and four Group 1 near-misses before he produced his ‘piece de resistance’ on his seasonal finale, when destroying a stacked field containing four classic winners in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes.

In other campaigns Blue Rose Cen would have been a worthy Horse Of The Year given her back-to-back classic triumphs and, after two shock reverses prompted by a lack of luck (in the Nassau Stakes) and lack of stamina (in the Prix Vermeille), heart-warming Prix de l’Opéra return to winning ways less than an hour after Ace Impact’s Arc blitz.

On this occasion, she may not even be the best three-year-old in the yard that Head inherited from his father, Freddy, on Avenue General Leclerc in Chantilly.

It is wonderful to think that the stellar stablemates will be back to entertain us afresh next term.

Sadly, the laws of the stallion jungle dictate that Ace Impact, who was bought into by Gousserie Racing’s Chehboub family following his Jockey Club for a sum that was many multiples of the €75,000 his previous sole owner, Serge Stempniak, paid for him as a yearling at Arqana, is too valuable a commodity to risk for a second season on the track.

His reputation could barely be raised above the stratospheric heights it has already reached and, given that he is much the best progeny from the first crop of Cracksman, the risk of a downturn in form and, shock-horror, first defeat, was simply not one worth taking prior to his retirement to Haras de Beaumont.

Ace Impact will forever be known as an unbeaten champion, yes, but his having only ever genuinely top class opponents twice in his entire career will be a source of regret in many quarters.

NOT only did the home team excel in the year’s best flat races, the bonanza of big prizes were shared out between no less than a dozen different domestic trainers.

Irish success was much less common than has become the norm, with Aidan O’Brien having to wait until September to get his name on the scoresheet thanks to Warm Heart’s victory in the Prix Vermeille – though he did go on to land another pair of juvenile Group 1s, thanks to Opera Singer in the Boussac and Los Angeles in the Criterium de Saint-Cloud.

One thing that did not change was the pair of names at the head of the trainers’ championship table: Jean Claude-Rouget, who won it for a fifth time, denying Andre Fabre, who has the small matter of 31 titles to his name.

Much more unusually, the pair had just a single individual Group 1 winner apiece: Ace Impact for Rouget and Mqse de Sevigne for Fabre.

On the jumping side

THIS sharing out of the showpiece races was mirrored on the jumping side of things, with only Arnaud Chaille-Chaille collecting more than one of the country’s nine Grade 1 races. Although Francois Nicolle will take champion trainer honours for the sixth year in a row, he did not manage a single Grade 1 win and nor did Guillaume Macaire, Nicolle and Chaille-Chaille’s Atlantic Coast neighbour who now shares his training licence with Hector de Lageneste.

Chaille-Chaille, whose solitary training title came back in 2007, has pushed Macaire back into third place – his worst finishing position for more than two decades.

The young interlopers among the upper echelons of French jump racing are the Anglo-Scandinavian partnership of Noel George, son of the British handler, Tom, and Amanda Zetterholm, the Swedish-born former partner of the Chantilly-based licence holder David Cottin.

In their first full season, the George/Zetterholm yard is likely to finish in seventh place on the ladder and houses arguably the best young prospect in the land in the shape of the emerging chaser Il Est Francais.

Mullins in on the act

WILLIE Mullins got in on the act too, landing his first French jumping victory since 2019 when Gala Marceau trumped her fine placed efforts at Cheltenham and Punchestown by taking the Grade 1 Prix Alain du Breil.

A three-strong Irish raid on the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris was less successful, although both Noble Yeats and Franco De Port were beaten by less than 16 lengths in finishing seventh and eighth behind Rosario Baron, who is by the Irish-based stallion Zambezi Sun and was giving trainer Daniela Mele by far her biggest victory.

The only jumper to win more than one Grade 1 prize was the admirable Theleme, who landed both the Grande Course de Haies d’Auteuil and the Grand Prix d’Automne and is now setting his sights on the Stayers’ Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival.

First in history

This Chaille-Chaille-trained Sidestep gelding also became the first horse in the history of French jumping to land a Grade 1 in each of his three-, four-, five- and six-year-old seasons and it will be intriguing to see how long he can keep this sequence going as he is still young.

The British contingent in French jumping circles has been even more successful within the jockey ranks as Felix de Giles, who emigrated across the Channel in 2015, is assured of winning his first riding crown, with another expat ‘rosbif’, James Reveley, who won it in each of the two preceding years, set to finish second, and a third, the Welsh-born Charly Prichard, also in the top 20 and set to be awarded the leading female rider title.

Flat title

The flat jockeys’ championship underwent an overhaul in 2022, changing from being calculated on a year-round basis to just the months of March to October. Maxime Guyon, who took the inaugural slimmed-down title, won it again this time having also been top dog under the different rules in 2019.

Clear-sightedness

Finally, a couple of moments at the end of the year underlined the impression that French racing seems to be moving in the right direction. First, in mid November, the stewards had the gumption and clear-sightedness to make the swift decision to disqualify a big race winner at Auteuil, Garry De La Brunie, after his rider, Johnny Charron, went over the eight-strike absolute limit for the use of his whip.

New president

Less than a month later, an efficient election was carried out a few days after the three candidates had gone on television to put forward their cases, and Guillaume de Saint-Seine was declared the new president of racing’s governing body, France Galop. Democracy was seen in action very clearly, ironically just a day after the British Jockey Club had announced, in its usual antiquated and high-handed manner, that Dido Harding was to become its new unelected senior steward.