ENGLISH TEXTS
19 wins from 89 runners and so only 21 %. The supply of winners has never let up, and October is likely to be the best month yet with 18 wins so far with a whole week to go, at 29 % of his runners. There have been a few disappointments, Juddmonte’ s three year old filly Sunly looked like a future top horse when winning a Group 3 in Chantilly at the beginning of June but was out of training by August, and then of course the Prix de l’ Arc de Triomphe winner Daryz not only lost his unbeaten record at York in August but managed to finish last of the six runners in the Juddmonte International. The successes have been many. Five three year old Group 1 winners, the Classic winners Zarigana and Gezora, the Arc winner Daryz and then Sahlan and Woodshauna, as well as five Group 1 winning older horses, Calandagan, Candelari, Quisisana, Sibayan and Goliath. There have not been a huge number of two year old winners but the stable includes two of the best three juvenile colts in France in Samangan and Rayif as well as one of the top three fillies in Narissa and some promising maiden winners like Ebiyar, Repel, Regal Resolve and Zayida. Graffard is at forty eight the youngest Champion trainer in France since Andre Fabre began his winning sequence back in 1987 at the age of forty two. Fabre was of course Champion for the next twenty one years consecutively and has a total of twenty eight Championships to date. Graffard joins Alain de Royer Dupre and Jean Claude Rouget as the only others to win the title in the last thirty-eight years. Fabre and a handful of other trainers have dominat- ed French racing throughout his period. Rouget has been among the top ten every year since and Henri Alex Pantall was only outside the top ten once, when he finished eleventh. Graffard himself has been among the top ten for eight of the last ten years, while Christophe Ferland has seven top ten finishes in the same period. In Britain the trainers’ championship has been a more competitive race with nine different winners in the same period, even if in recent years it has been shared between Aidan O’ Brien, Charlie Appleby and John Gosden. Gosden, together with his son Thady is the only one who has been among the top ten throughout, although there are several other family dynasties including the Hannons, Coles, Easterbys, Hills, and Johnstons. Those who have yet to win a championship include William Haggas, despite finishing in the top ten more or less every year since 2011, and then more recent contenders include Andrew Balding and Karl Burke. Balding leads this year by wins with 186 so far and has been runner up in terms of prizemoney the last two seasons. Graffard’ s dominant win this year suggests that in France a change of generations has finally arrived. Andre Fabre has been at the top for so long that his closest rivals from the beginning have long since passed on or retired. Fabre is still there competing successfully in his eightieth year, but the future of French racing breeding will be written by other hands.
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TRAINER GEORGE SCOTT, GROUP 1 TRAINER
BY KATHERINE FORD
“ Today is a very special day for me and my team. A first Group 1 victory. I have been training for ten years and I have won plenty of black-type races, but I had not yet managed to win a Group 1.”
In the winner’ s enclosure after the Qatar Prix du Cadran( Gr. 1), George Scott is over the moon. Supplemented, Caballo de Mar, who came through the handicap ranks and had won the German St Leger two weeks earlier, continued his progression to fly the Bahraini colours of Victorious Forever in the French showpiece race reserved for stayers.“ I am delighted that the owners, Sheikhs Nasser and Khalid, are here to experience this moment. Caballo de Mar is a special horse. He started his career in low-grade handicaps but he has a very big heart. Everything went perfectly according to our plan.” George Scott has been working towards this moment since his teenage years. The son of a farmer who grew up in Shropshire, he explains,“ I didn’ t have direct contact with racing, but my great-grandfather trained in Newmarket at the end of the First World War, so I feel a deep connection. I grew up around animals, hunting and Point-to-Point, and my competitive spirit led me into racing.” The NH-racing culture led George to his first job with Paul Nicholls, who was at the peak of his powers.“ It was the era of Kauto Star and Denman!
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