'It Was Like a Dream': Pascal Bary Reflects on Storied Career

It's not yet nine o'clock and the office is almost empty, as good as new. Pascal Bary saw his last horses leave the day before, and he's offering one of his last employees their pick of the framed victory photos still displayed on a shelf. 

Almost 45 years after obtaining his licence, the trainer with six French Derbys to his name is packing his bags.

The yard is still bustling because his boxes will now be occupied by Mario Baratti, who is steadily climbing the ranks of Chantilly trainers today and has filled the stalls that his predecessor had emptied over the weeks. It's just as well. 

“The horses in the boxes of this stable today are no longer mine, but the yard remains full, lively, so that's okay,” explains Bary. “It's great! I love the horse as an animal. I need them. To see them, to touch them, to take them out, to breathe them in. I can't imagine not seeing them any more. There will always be horses in my life.”

Over the past few years, Bary has gradually reduced his activity. He sold his annex yard, going from 120 horses at the peak of his career in the 2000s to around 40. The number of his runners has continuously decreased and, with it, the number of winners too. The announcement of his retirement will therefore not have surprised his Chantilly neighbours. The French public may not have had time to notice, preoccupied as it is with the winner of the next tiercé. The career of a great trainer, barring unforeseen circumstances, often goes gently into the good night.

In the last two years, only Feed the Flame (Kingman), winner of the G1 Grand Prix de Paris in 2023, then third this year in the G1 Prix Ganay and the Coronation Cup before finishing second in the G1 Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud, has kept him at the top. He was unfortunately pulled up in the G2 Qatar Prix Foy while preparing for a second Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. It's an exit from the track that is both cruel and unfair, as much for the class of the horse as for the trainer and his owner, Jean-Louis Bouchard. However, Pascal Bary's decision to stop his activity came a little earlier. 

“I really started thinking about it after Feed the Flame's Grand Prix de Paris,” he confides. “I told myself that the horse would have a good four-year-old season and that afterwards, I could leave.”

The charm of entrepreneur Jean-Louis Bouchard's silks, dark green with pink epaulettes, worked almost to the end. Together, he and Bary won four Prix du Jockey Clubs with Celtic Arms (1994), Ragmar (1996), Dream Well (under the colours of Maria Niarchos, breeder of the colt and partner with Jean-Louis Bouchard) then Blue Canari (2004), who would win the very last edition of the French Derby when run over 2,400m before its shortening to 2,100m, still in force today.

With the exception of Dream Well, none of these horses had great success at stud, which did not diminish their trainer's admiration.

“Most of Jean-Louis Bouchard's colts were chosen and bought, with the help of Gérard Larrieu, for this race, during their careers,” he explains. “Celtic Arms was a very good horse. He had run in the Morny at two, then won the Condé, and the Lupin before the Jockey Club, but he had no pedigree. As for Ragmar, he was beaten by a short-head at two in the Critérium de Saint-Cloud by Polaris Flight, whom he beat, again by a nose, in the Jockey Club the following year. These two horses, six months apart, ran true to their respective form. Ragmar was a real racehorse. The horses from the Niarchos family or Khalid Abdullah, on the other hand, were primarily homebreds. It's not the same perspective. It is also thanks to Dream Well's victory that I received foals from the Niarchos family afterwards. Until then, after François Boutin, they were mainly dispatched in Britain. It was Dream Well that brought us together.”

Training is instinctive, you can't learn it.There is experience, of course, and a lot of observation

The legacy of François Boutin, with whom Pascal spent nearly four years after a season with Sir Mark Prescott and before setting up on his own, does not shine through this remarkable series of successes in the Prix du Jockey Club. Indeed, after numerous places, the previous trainer of the Niarchos family only won one edition of the French Derby, in 1993, a few months before his parting, thanks to Hernando. However, in the 11 years that followed, Bary saddled five Jockey Club winners, then none for 14 years, until 2018 with Study of Man.

One could seek in this gap a difficulty in adapting to the new distance of the race, but it is undoubtedly rather a circumstance corollary to the stable organisation, and not a consequence of it: a trainer makes do with what he gets. Moreover, in the meantime, Divine Proportions (2005) and Senga (2017) also won the G1 Prix de Diane (also run over 2,100m). One season, in 2004, Pascal Bary had in his yard, that is to say at the foot of his house, three champions: Six Perfections, Denebola and Divine Proportions, soon replaced by the phenomenal Natagora.

The eleven Classic winners saddled by Bary, with the Royal-Oak of Ice Breeze, winner of this French St Leger in 2017, and the Poules d'Essai des Pouliches (French 1,000) of Bluemamba (2000) and Divine Proportions (2005), should not overshadow Pascal Bary's remarkable success with juveniles, which was the signature of François Boutin, and before him of his own apprenticeship master, Étienne Pollet.

Moreover, it was with an extraordinary two-year-old that Bary's career really took off. In 1982, he saddled the two-year-old Deep Roots, winner of the G1 Prix Morny at Deauville in the colours of Corine and Patrick Barbe. The colt was one of the three yearlings he received the previous autumn… “I started with a runner in a claiming race in my father's colours who was immediately claimed!” he laughs. “I also ran a lot of claimers, especially with Jean-Louis Bouchard. It was a very fun time. There were many more claimers on the French programme than today. When I started, I never imagined for a moment winning so many races. Well, it didn't even cross my mind. And then afterwards, things happened gradually. With Deep Roots, there was no need to ask any questions. He won his first race easily. Then, he was demoted to third place in the Prix du Bois. Then we were narrowly beaten in the Papin and he won the Morny. A pretty straightforward path, really. He was a super racehorse, a real two-year-old. I hadn't really asked myself the question, but I was training for that, to win big races.”

And to win big races, you certainly need good horses, but you also need to know how to handle them, which is not written in any manual of the perfect trainer, which, it seems, does not exist anyway… “Training is instinctive, you can't learn it,” he says. “There is experience, of course, and a lot of observation. Both on the track and in the box, all the time. It's a job that prevents you from doing anything else. You don't have the time because a horse's career involves thousands of little details to sort out. Yet, while being omnipresent, you have to try to keep some perspective. If it's not going well, wait. Adapt and try to understand. The faster you understand them, the less you need to work them, and the less you damage them. Horses don't all need the same routine, but they do need a routine. They need a routine that is their own. So I've spent my life worrying about the details, for every one of them. I arrived first in the yard, I left last, and I loved every bit of it. I still love it, but I don't have the same energy any more. It's a demanding job, and I was lucky to have a good family environment, a very balanced life. I didn't need anything else.”

Bary with Study Of Man, his sixth Prix du Jockey Club winner | Scoop Dyga

With a record like his, it would be unbecoming of Pascal to mention regrets, but what emerges from his reflections today is a satisfaction which, at the moment of changing his life, is unusual, and yet not feigned. 

“Because everything seemed easy to me, from the beginning,” he explains. “I loved my job and I started training easily. Sometimes you have doubts, but overall, I've had the best job in the world. I'm at home, among my horses, it's like a dream to wake up here with Denebola, Six Perfections, Divine Proportions, Blue Canari in your boxes… Seeing them every morning, coming back from Deauville with half the catalogue about to head into your yard, it's more work, but these are great moments. Our environment has changed, of course, and if I'm no longer fashionable, I still work the same way. Besides, that's probably one of the reasons why I'm stopping: because I don't want to change. Sir Mark Prescott, from whom I learned the basics of the trade – and English! – probably hasn't changed much in his way of working either! Maybe I should, but I don't want to, I don't need to.”

Back outside, Mario Baratti's staff are doing their work and Pascal Bary is settling the final details of his departure. Even once his horses have left, there are still many details to be settled before the big departure. Despite everything, the sun is shining, everything is gleaming, and it's a bad day to be sad.

“Yesterday, the weather was bad, but today, it's magnificent, look!” says Bary, pointing to the garden, the high hedge, the horses passing behind, in a small wood, and beyond, barely visible under a winter-blue sky, the vast expanse of Les Aigles. We understand better then why Pascal he to stay a few more years in the house at the yard, why he says of his career that it unfolded “like a dream”.

The next day, however, for his departure to a house dear to him in the Dordogne, snow began to fall on the northern half of France, and notably on Chantilly.

The road south like a blank page for Pascal to write a new story.