Reynier: a man making the most out of life

Jocelyn de Moubray meets the Marseilles-based trainer Jerome Reynier, who joined the Group 1 winners’ club in May when Skalleti won the Prix d’Ispahan

THE YEAR 2021 has been an important one for Jerome Reynier and his Marseillesbased stable. In only his ninth season as a public trainer Reynier is currently fifth in the French trainers’ table, and with 11 wins and 13 places in Group and stakes races, his record in black-type races is only surpassed by Andre Fabré and Jean-Claude Rouget.

The Prix d’Ispahan at ParisLongchamp in May was a first Group 1 win for Reynier and for Jean-Claude Seroul’s brilliant Kendargent gelding Skalleti.

Skalleti is now unbeaten in three starts this year, while his stable companion Marianafoot has been one of the other stars of the French season winning all six of his starts, including a Listed and two Group 3s at ParisLongchamp. Seroul’s two six-yearolds Skalleti and Marianafoot have run 33 times between them since Reynier took over responsibility for the owner’s stable at Calas, the training centre which lies between Marseilles and Aix en Provence, in the autumn of 2018.

The pair has won 25 of these starts winning a total of 15 Group and Listed races and more than €2,500,000.

Reynier has passed other milestones this year. The 37-year-old became a father for the second time when his son Marius was born, he and his partner Marie Richert also have a daughter called Rose, while on July 4, Wetrov, a six-year-old gelding part-owned by his partner, became his 500th winner as a trainer when taking a claimer at Castera- Verduza.

“Castera-Verduza is,” he explains, “a lovely little track between Toulouse and Mont-de- Marsan. It is a place where you eat very well!”

Thinking about Castera-Verduza, eating and the French provinces leads him on to indulge in a small fantasy.

“Sometimes,” he muses, “I think of giving this up and setting out across France in a camper van with my family and a trailer with a couple of horses behind. We could stop and run at some of the small tracks to pay the bills and just travel around the country!”

For the time being, however, Reynier is firmly focused on his primary dream, which is to make a place for himself in the racing world and become one of the leading trainers in France, and in Europe.

Reynier’s decisive contact with racing came not from the animal itself or even from the racecourse, but from memories of events which took place when he was too young to follow and the stories his father Serge Reynier told of them.

The most familiar of these stories was the one about the Prix Djebel at Maisons Laffitte in 1988.

It featured the seasonal reappearance of the two-year-old champion Common Grounds, the winner of the Prix de la Salamandre trained by François Boutin.

He was beaten by a horse from Marseilles called Shaindy, a son of American Stress trained by Henri Rossi, and bred by one Serge Reynier.

Reynier Snr was an architect with a passion for racing, but this interest caused family friction and so when Reynier was growing up in Marseilles there were no horses or even visits to the two racecourses.

“I followed racing with passion,” he says, “but through magazines and books. When my parents separated in 1997 one of the first things my father did was to take me to Deauville for the August Yearling Sale.”

The sale and the yearlings provided a focus for the young Reynier’s attention. He did his first work experience at the Haras des Chartreux in Normandy at 15 years old, the first time the future trainer was in contact with, and working with, horses.

He then decided he would need to speak English and so he went to work for David Shekells at Old Mill Stud, near Newmarket, to help prepare the yearlings for the Deauville August Sale.

I really didn’t speak a word of English when I arrived at Old Mill Stud, the first words I learnt were shovel, fork and brush!

ONCE HE HAD LEFT school with his baccalaureate he prolonged the work experiences and become fully fluent in English. He spent a breeding season at Coolmore, worked the sales in France and Germany and then went on the Irish National Stud’s course.

“At Coolmore the mares I helped to look after included Hold On, whose son Hurricane Run won the Irish Derby that year,” he remembers. “The mark I was given for a study of pedigrees at the Irish National Stud was high enough to help me be accepted on to the Godolphin Flying Start.”

After the Flying Start took him around the world and into contact with trainers, Reynier had a brief stint as a bloodstock agent. He then decided he wanted to be a trainer.

At first he worked as a private trainer for the Ecurie Camacho and then France Galop gave him a licence and he started as a public trainer in 2013 at Calas near Marseilles.

“I never really considered settling outside France,” he explains. “I come from Marseilles and I wanted to move back to be near my father, who was not in good health.”

Reynier with his wife Marie Richert and eldest child, daughter Rose (2), and dog Poppy

From the beginning Reynier made a mark and the stable expanded quickly going from 14 wins the first season to 56 by year four.

When Seroul asked him to take over his stable in conjunction with Reynier’s own, the operation bounded forward.

Seroul has some 55 horses in training, many home-breds, as well as the yearlings he buys regularly, and he has been among the leading owners and breeders in France for decades. The horses in the Seroul boxes in October 2018 included Skalletti, an unraced three-year-old, as well as Marianafoot, also a three-year-old but who had won three races for his previous trainers Frederic Rossi and Patrick Khozian.

“Skalletti was more or less resting when I first took over,” Reynier says. “He had shown plenty of ability at two, but had been very difficult which is why he had been gelded. He then had problems with his feet, problems he still has as he has very flat hooves.

“His feet are the reason we prefer running him on soft tracks, he does love soft ground, but above all he takes longer to recuperate if we run him on firm ground.

“It took time to get to know him. He is a solitary character, who enjoys his routine.

“For years he had to go out first lot, and would stress if anyone went before him. And though he has become more mature, he still has his own walking ring. We never push him in the morning and he has never worked on the Turf at Calas, only on the All-Weather.

“When he went to Nimes to make his debut I was confident he would run well, even if it is never my aim to win first time out. When he won well without having to be ridden I knew we had an interesting horse!”

Reynier‘s string using the picturesque gallops at Calas, Marseille

SKALLETI soon proved himself to be a little more than interesting. He won ten of his first 11 races and ended his fouryear-old career with a sequence of Group victories at Deauville, ParisLongchamp and Rome over a mile and then 1m2f.

It took him a few races to come back to his very best at five, but, after beating Sottsass to win a Group 3 in Deauville, he then won a second Group 2 Prix Dollar on Arc weekend before travelling to Ascot to finish second behind Addeybb in the Group 1 Champion Stakes.

Skalleti then travelled to Hong Kong for the Hong Kong Cup in December 2020. The race was not run to suit him as, unusually, there was no early pace and he reverted to old habits failing to settle in the early stages. He was beaten less than 5l into seventh, but a bad race then turned into a nightmare.

“Skalleti came out of the race very tired indeed,” Reynier explains. “He was so stressed that when he got back to Newmarket on his way home he had a bout of colic. I was convinced we had lost him and was very cross with myself for having taken him to Hong Kong.

“It was only in February that he started to come back to his usual self. He had only been in work for a month or so before he made his seasonal debut at Saint-Cloud.”

Whatever his trainer was expecting Skalleti came back flying putting up one of his best performances to date giving weight and a beating to the Group 1 performers Grand Glory and Ecrivan.

Three weeks later he returned to Paris to beat the Group 1 Prix Ganay winner Mare Australis in the Group 2 Prix Harcourt before winning his first Group 1 over 1m1f with an extraordinary show of speed to win the Ispahan from Tilsit and My Oberon.

Skalleti ran the last 2f in 21.32secs, 15 per cent faster than the average of the race overall, and he accelerated despite losing a shoe before turning into the home straight.

“For the future I would love to run him in the Jacques le Marois over the straight mile in Deauville, but as a gelding he is barred, so he is likely to run in the Gontaut Biron and then we will consider the best route to take to get to Ascot for the Champion Stakes.

“Our aim is keep the horse performing at his peak for as long as possible.”

Skalleti with Matthieu Poggi

Marianafoot, the stable’s other star, will also be running in Deauville, with a plan for the Group 1 Prix Maurice de Gheest over 6f.

Reynier is considering running him again only a week later in the Jacques Le Marois over a mile.

“I take eight boxes in Deauville during August and so he would stay on the racecourse and we could keep him ticking over between races.”

Marianafoot has won eight of his last nine starts, a sequence which began in Deauville in December 2019. His only defeat came in Doha when he returned home lame.

“He had a joint problem and I decided to give him a long break. I am not sure he is better than ever since his return, but he has won seven in a row and it was a long term plan to win the two Group 3s at ParisLongchamp over 7f.”

Marianafoot ridden by Cédric Larry

REYNIER IS understandably proud of what he has achieved in Marseilles, and for the time being he has no plans to change a winning formula.

“I would, of course, consider carefully any proposition,” he says, “but why would I want to move when things are going well? I also believe it is very difficult for a trainer to move base.

“You get used to using the same tracks and places, and for any trainer to move is to create new and different challenges and problems. Monsieur Seroul has 55 horses and I have 40 boxes of my own and have no plans to take on any more.

“I get up at 3.30am every morning and have the time to go around all of the horses in my care before work begins. If I had more boxes and more horses it would be a different job, a different life, and it would also involve taking a greater financial risk as in France it is expensive to employ people.

In my yard we are less than 15 who work full time; we are a family and it is this, and the contact with the horses themselves, that I enjoy the most

Reynier’s progression to the top five trainers in France has not followed any of the usual paths.

He had almost no contact with any type of horse until he was 15, and his family had no connection with racing and the closed world of racing’s professionals.

“When I did go racing with my father,” he says, “we were always with the public on the outside looking in as he didn’t have the badges to go to the stables or into the paddock.”

Reynier has made his own place in the racing world, and he has done it from his home base in Marseilles. In such a competitive world nothing can ever be taken for granted, but for the immediate future Reynier is in a position where he can afford to continue on his own route.