euro racing
Flying fillies
Fillies won all five Group 1 races at Deauville, observes Jocelyn de Moubray
D
eauville’s August race meeting is about the most international event in the European calendar with runners from two, three or more countries in more or less every Group and stakes race. As is expected these days English trainers dominated the two-year-old Group and stakes races; Myriam Bollack Badel was the only French trainer to win a black-type race with a two-year-old. More surprisingly nearly all of the equine stars of the month are female. The fillies With You, Polydream, Alpha Centauri, Nonza and Pretty Pollyanna won all five of the Group 1 races. This was a far
better year for France’s trainers than 2017 had been – between them they won three of the five Group 1 races and three of the four Group 2 races. No French-trained three-year-old colt managed to win a Group race, but the threeyear-old fillies Castellar, Wind Chimes and Homerique all put up impressive winning performances. France’s major trainers may be less interested in running their best two-year-olds in Deauville than was once the case, but there were impressive two-year-old winners for Le Havre, Lope De Vega, Frankel, Siyouni and Kingman who will be competing in Group races over the coming months. Freddy Head has won a great many
Group 1 races in Deauville and he has a particularly strong group of three-year-old fillies in his stable this year who were prepared for the meeting. George Strawbridge’s With You dropped back in trip after two narrow defeats behind Laurens over 1m2f to win the Group 1 Prix Rothschild at the beginning of the month. Only two weeks later the Dansili filly returned for the Prix Jacques Le Marois where she was again prominent and kept on for an honourable third place behind Alpha Centauri and Recoletos. Alpha Centauri had already proved her superiority over her own generation and racing against older horses and colts
Recoletos: won the Prix D’Ispahan at Longchamp in May (seen here), but the Whipper filly had no answers to the power that is Alpha Centauri
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