Flintshire can give trainer Andre Fabre his eighth win in Europe’s most prestigious race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp today (start: 19:30, UAE time) in one of the races most open fields for years.
Taghrooda, owned by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Crown Prince of Dubai, starts as favourite but as jockey Franki Dettori said last week, “you can name 10 horses that can win this year.”
Fabre, who already holds the record as the trainer with most wins in the race, last saddled the winner in 2006 with Rail Link, who was drawn in stall four the same one Flintshire drew.
Flintshire, whose owner Prince Khaled Abdullah also owned Rail Link, was an eyecatching second in the Prix Foy last time out, and with Fabre being a master at preparing horses for the Arc, and the ground set to be good, it suggests that everything has come right for him.
“He hasn’t won this season but he was second in the Coronation Cup beaten by perhaps the best horse in Europe, Cirrus des Aigles,” said Abdullah’s French racing manager Claude Beniada.
Japan provide three potential winners in the maximum field of 20, all of them Group One winners, in the shape of the Naosuke Sugai-trained five-year-old duo Gold Ship and Just A Way, and three-year-old filly Harp Star, trained by veteran Hiroyoshi Matsuda. All three have got decent draws but doubts remain over whether they can improve on Japan’s record of four runners-ups.
Gold Ship and Just A Way will have to defy their age, no five-year-old has won since Marienbard in 2002, while question marks exist over whether the latter will stay the one 1/2 mile (2400m) trip.
However, Just A Way’s jockey Yuichi Fukunaga is adamant that the horse he guided to a hugely impressive six 1/2 length victory in the Dubai Duty Free in Dubai in March is capable of ending Japan’s 47-year quest to win the Arc.
“Victory in the Arc is the dream and the goal of the Japanese people,” said the 37-year-old two-time champion Japanese jockey. “I waited a long time to have a ride that is good enough to race in the Arc and now I have struck lucky.”
English trainer John Gosden has also fallen short in the Arc but he arrives with perhaps his best chance yet in the shape of Taghrooda, winner of both the Epsom Oaks and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
She suffered her first and as yet only defeat at the hands of Tapestry last time out in the Yorkshire Oaks.
Gosden said: “She handles any ground around good – not very soft and certainly not like a road. She’s not over-raced and I think being a three-year-old filly is a big factor.”
Gosden will hope that Taghrooda performs as brilliantly as Treve did last year, as then a three-year-old she destroyed a high class field.
Treve has failed to win in her three starts this year.
