A golden era

French racing really enjoyed a golden age through the 1970s, frequently some of the best horses in Europe and the world were trained in France.

Jocelyn de Moubray analyses why racing in France, and indeed Europe, is quite different now and what can be done to improve matters

IDON’T USUALLY spend a great deal of time thinking about racing in the 1970s, but Lester Piggott’s death led me, via Twitter, to watch some of the decade’s best races again. And it was a great pleasure to witness Lester’s elegance and tactical finesse,

however, his excellence was one of several aspects of the time which struck me as relevant to racing some 30 years later.

Taking a random sample of big races reposted on social media following Piggott’s death it seemed that at the time there was usually a serious French-trained runner in the best races in Britain during the 1970s. It was, of course, in many different ways the golden age of racing in France.

At the beginning of that decade the Tiercé was at its absolute peak as the country’s popular betting medium and French racing had the prize-money; the new, modern racecourses filled every Sunday, and had the technology to attract the best horses and horsemen from all over the world.

The first Tiercé to be televised was in 1956 and between then and 1980 turnover on what was initially only a weekly event held every Sunday, rose by 5000 per cent in 25 years and accounted for nearly 70 per cent of betting turnover in France.

During the 1970s the major Frenchtrained winners in England included Dahlia, Empery, Pawneese, Flying Water, Sagaro, Northern Baby, Nonoalco, Ace Of Aces and Lassalle, while others such as Gyr, Gay Mecene, Dancing Maid, Nobiliary, Caro, Allez France and Blushing Groom made a name for themselves in England’s best races without winning one.

Sometimes, as Maurice Zilber enjoyed pointing out after winning the Derby with Empery in 1976, the top French trainers kept their best horses for the races at home in France as they knew they could win in England with those just below in quality.

Many of the best of these French-trained horses were American-breds and at the time it was French-based owners and trainers, as well, of course, Vincent O’Brien, who were most actively looking for the best young thoroughbreds in North America.

The Texan Nelson Bunker Hunt owned stables and a huge string of horses in France, who were often sent to race in Britain, headed by the incomparable Dahlia. France’s leading trainers, including François Boutin and Alec Head, were among the first to realise that then the best racehorses were being bred in North America.

If a proportion of the world’s best racehorses were attracted to France in the 1970s, aside from the prize-money and the facilities, there was also the appeal of a strong group of trainers in the prime of their lives with international experience and ambitions.

Boutin had first come to prominence when winning the Oaks at Epsom with La Lagune in 1968 when he was only 31. Alec Head was more or less the same age when he won the Derby with Lavandin in 1956, and these two were joined at Chantilly by the expatriates Maurice Zilber, who had come from Egypt, and the Argentine Angel Penna.

François Mathet may have been the perennial leading trainer in France, but in England, Ireland and the US, the Frenchbased trainers who made their mark were Zilber, Penna, Head and, above all, Boutin. Nobody at the time would have been aware, but by the end of the 1970s the tide had already turned against the French racing world. There were internal mistakes.

The disastrous decision to limit severely the exposure of racing on television, as otherwise, the argument went, nobody will bother going to the racecourse itself, was taken in the early 1970s.

By the time Jean Luc Lagardère took over as president of France Galop in 1995, and launched France Course the following year to show racing on a dedicated television channel, generations of French people had grown up without any exposure to racing on the television, and the country’s racecourses were already deserted for all, but the special occasions.

At the same time the Tiercé had been so successful as a popular mass betting medium that no provision was made for the future when the betting market would be transformed by technological and political changes. The Tiercé went from once a week, to four times a week, to every day, but it was only after a decade or two of growth had been lost that the PMU finally started to adapt to the modern world.

Lyphard with his trainer, the late Alec Head (left), and jockey Freddy Head. The colt retired to stand at Haras d’Etreham in 1973, but, in 1978 amid the growing power of the French socialist party under its leader François Mitterand, it meant that Lyphard, along with Nureyev and Riverman, was transferred to stand in Kentucky in the US

IT WAS ONLY UNDER Lagardère that French racing began to relax its centralised model.

Half of Europe’s racecourses are in France, but it was only at the end of the 1990s that France Galop agreed to run the first Tiercé outside Paris – it took place at Lyon and attracted 40,000 to a racecourse where today a good crowd would be one which reaches four figures.

Until this century French racing was rigidly centralised and all of the good races and money were at the Paris tracks, with the rest of country competing at a lower level in every respect.

If those responsible for French racing made some terrible decisions, ultimately the important factors were far beyond their control.

In 1981, François Mitterand was elected France’s first socialist president and, hard though it may be to understand today, at the time for many this heralded a coming revolution. A significant amount of wealth left France quickly and the assets rushed onto a plane, included the great stallions Riverman, Lyphard and Nureyev.

Many of those who had been investing in bloodstock and racehorses in France switched their focus to Kentucky where the greatest of all bloodstock bubbles was taking off in the early 1980s.

The Kentucky bloodstock boom was fuelled by the arrival of new buyers of racehorses from Dubai and Saudi Arabia and for reasons of culture and language none of these new stables were to be based in France – their management teams have always been a mixture of English speakers from England, Ireland and the US.

The Maktoum family and Juddmonte, founded by Prince Khalid Abdullah, raced horses in France for decades but they never purchased farms or based their stallions and broodmares there. OVER THE first two decades of the 21st century French racing and above all Frenchbased breeding has made significant progress.

The quality of stallions available to breeders in France is higher today than it has been at any moment during the last 40 years.

There may no longer be homebreds representing Lagardère, the Wildenstein family, the Niarchos family, the Moussac family and others in many of the major races, but the quality of commercial breeding in France has never been higher.

French racing is now a nationwide sport and of the leading Group race trainers in France, only Fabre and Francis-Henri Graffard are based in Chantilly; Jean-Claude Rouget, Jerome Reynier and Henri Alex Pantall are in Deauville, Pau, Marseilles and the west of France.

One thing French racing does a great deal less well than either Britain or Ireland is encourage young professionals. Many of the best young French jockeys are currently riding in either the US or Hong Kong having failed to establish a position at home.

Fabre, Rouget and Pantall have been France’s leading Group race trainers throughout the century, and it has proved very difficult indeed for the younger generations to break through

The relatively high prize-money in France, together with the generous premiums for French-bred horses who race in France, has not encouraged France’s trainers to race abroad, except when absolutely necessary. France’s prize-money structure has attracted much of the Italian racing and breeding world to move there and it keeps many of Germany’s trainers afloat, while for all but a handful of the very best French horses earn more money by racing in France than travelling to England, Ireland or further afield.

There are regular articles in the French professional press posing questions as to whether or not French-trained horses can still compete with their rivals trained in Britain and Ireland and the apparent or perceived decline in standards is still something racing professionals and fans are concerned with.

However, there seems to be something more complex going on as the lack of top-class horses is not a French problem, but rather one which is affecting Britain and Ireland at the same time.

In Britain, the number of horses rated 111 or higher fell by some 40 per cent between 2010 and 2021 to 100.

In France, there were 46 horses rated the equivalent of 111 or higher in 2019, the last pre-covid season. The number of Frenchbased horses rated at this level has been stable for some time as in 2001 there were 47, however, if you look three-year-olds there has been a sharp decline. In 2001 there were three French three-year-olds rated 120+ and 24 rated 111+, in 2019 these figures had fallen to just one and 12.

Go back to 1993, which is as far as France Galop’s website goes, and there were nine three-year-olds rated 120+ and 40 rated 111+.

This may seem a long tangent in an article which began by looking at French runners in Britain in the 1970s, but in the end the two are at least in my mind clearly linked.

Although it is not something which has been discussed in the various articles and letters to Racing Post, TDN and other trade publications which have addressed the problem with competition in better races, the decline in the number of high-rated horses could very well be a function of the expansion in the number of races in the European Pattern race programme.

The European Pattern started in 1971, but during its first decade it was relatively small and didn’t aspire to do anything more than codify the races which had always been considered to be the most important.

IF FRENCH-TRAINED horses went to race in England it was in the great races, the Classics, the Eclipse, the Champion Stakes and the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth, races which did not need labels in order to be attractive.

The dramatic expansion in Pattern races came later, fuelled by the desire of every sales company to have as many black-type races as was possible.

The only country which has done things differently is Japan. In Japan there are still very few Group and Listed races, a total of 129 Group races and 232 black-type races out of 16,000 races in the country.

In Europe, there are about 14,000 races in Britain, Ireland, France and Germany together and a total of 392 Group races and 750 black-type races (five per cent).

In Japan, 0.8 per cent of all races are Group races and 1.4 per cent are black-type.

If Europe wished to return to similar ratios it would have to downgrade 280 Group races and some 500 Listed races.

The results of the Japanese policy are looking very positive indeed for Japanese racing and breeding at the moment. There is no problem with competition in Japan where every Group 1 attracts a full field, nor is there a lack of highly-rated horses.

Vadeni winning the Eclipse Stakes, the first French-trained winner of the Group 1 since 1960. The fall in the number of top-class horses in France is not just restricted to the country and Jocelyn de Moubray believes it is more of a broader European-wide issue

Horses are only likely to achieve high ratings if the best are encouraged to race against each other. This has long since ceased to be the case in Europe and what has been a relatively unexposed problem in England, Ireland and France is becoming ever clearer now that the overall number of horses in training is falling and the best of them tend to be owned by a small selection of the same owners.

A dramatic change from the current situation would be almost impossible to enact.

Too much has been unthinkingly invested in a failing system for too long.

The European Pattern is not only absurdly inflated, but it is based upon the dubious parameter of an average rating of the first four in each race (it would make sense to give more weight to the winner’s rating to promote those races which produce top class winners).

The Pattern has become a self-fulfilling loop as every national organisation only gives high ratings to horses running in Pattern races as understandably each country wishes to protect its own races.

After decades in which Japan’s racing professionals were keen to learn from their counterparts in Europe, North America and Australia it is time for Europeans to understand the features of the Japanese system which are working so well today.

However, looking back to the 1970s does at least demonstrate how an attractive European racing system used to be – one in which the best horses from all over Europe regularly competed against each other in the few races widely acknowledged to be the ones which count.