Study of Man

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...

Multiple Classic-winning trainer Pascal Bary has announced his retirement after 44 years in the French training ranks. The Chantilly trainer saddled the winner of the Prix du Jockey Club on six occasions, starting with Celtic Arms (Fr) in 1994 and most recently with Study Of Man (Ire) in 2018. Over the years, Bary, 71, has been associated with a stream of great equine names, most notably for the Niarchos family, for whom he won two further Jockey Clubs with the half-brothers Dream Well (Fr) and Sulamani (Ire), and the Prix...

It's probably now just about safe for the TDN team to leave our desks briefly without fear of another stallion fee announcement dropping into the inbox. So, now that the numbers are in, here is a little further investigation as to who's going where and for how much. There were cautionary notes among last year's stallion fee announcements, just as there have been again this time around, which is no surprise given that the foal crop in Britain and Ireland has dropped again, this time by six per cent, to...

Classic winner Study Of Man (Ire), whose breakthrough season included a Group 1 victory for Kalpana (GB) on Qipco British Champions Day, will stand at the increased fee of £25,000 next season at Lanwades Stud. The son of Deep Impact (Jpn) covered his biggest book of 123 mares in 2024 - the first time it stretched into three figures - following the encouraging results of his first crop of two-year-olds. Having stood at £15,000 in his opening season, he had subsequently been advertised at £12,500. His five black-type winners include...

It's been tricky to focus on the racing of late with all the theatrics at Tattersalls, so let's call this fourteen days and attempt a catch-up in the brief period between the sales starting up again at Arqana on Tuesday. The extraordinary prices of Books 1 and 2 at the October Yearling Sale tell only half the story, and we all know that in any sales season there are tales of the haves and the have-nots. Perhaps the most interesting element of the top end is what feels like a...

It's been a while, hasn't it? We can only apologise for the onslaught of the sales and some extra international travel pushing the Seven Days beat on to the back-burner, but we're home now, almost jetlag-free, and ready for this week's round-up. Quite a lot of Sunday mornings are spent trudging along the Devil's Dyke which separates Newmarket's Rowley Mile from the July Course. The dogs love it, but this walker felt a little wearier this past weekend at the thought that we've now switched back to the Rowley Mile...

We're not quite halfway through the Flat season but Royal Ascot feels like a pivotal point. It's not just the fact that it coincides with the summer solstice (even though summer has really only just arrived in these parts) but it includes the first properly meaningful two-year-old contests along with a set of races for the Classic generation which start to underline the really serious prospects. While the yearling sales may tell one story of the popularity of stallions, one only needs to peruse the stakes race results on a...

If you are a racing tragic, and I'd like to think that most TDN readers fall into this celebrated bracket, it is impossible to have a day off at the moment. Trials, Classics, they come thick and fast in these heady weeks of spring. We've waited winterlong, starved of any meaningful action, and now it's hard not to feel a little queasy at the veritable feast of racing which is set before us, course after course after course. There's barely even room for the Cartmel Sticky Toffee Pudding Maiden Hurdle. ...

Sunday at Longchamp was a day for firsts. A Classic victory for Rouhiya (Fr) (Lope De Vega {Ire}) in the Poule d'Essai des Pouliches was an important milestone in the partnership between trainer Francis Graffard and the Aga Khan's powerful racing and breeding operation. Then came a first Classic in his adopted home country for 34-year-old Mario Barrati when Metropolitan (Fr) (Zarak {Fr}) landed the Poulains, a year after the Italian trainer had won the German 2,000 Guineas with Angers (Fr) (Seabhac). But perhaps most notable of all, especially as...

Since the turn of this century we have been blessed to see some special fillies and mares win the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Zarkava (Fr) was followed by Danedream (Ger), Solemia (Ire), Found (Ire), Treve (Fr) and Enable (GB), with the last two named each winning the great race twice. The latest to add her name to that roll of honour was Kirsten Rausing's homebred Alpinista (GB), in 2022. This season the daughter of Frankel (GB) has become a mother for the first time after foaling a filly by...

A person whose job it is to promote horse racing was, rather disappointingly, being sniffy about the Craven meeting on social media last week. I understand that some people don't like racing at the Rowley Mile and, yes, last Tuesday in particular was a little challenging on the weather front. But if you're a Flat racing person, and particularly one who is being paid to tell other people that they should come racing, then you really should appreciate all that is wonderful about these weeks of Classic trials across Europe....

Stick or twist? That's the question faced by many breeders this year. Anecdotally, it appears that some will be pulling back and not covering certain mares, which is understandable after a tricky sales season, not to mention the constant reminders from racecourse managers regarding the "significant headwinds" faced by racing. Unlike America, the foal crop in Britain and Ireland has been gently on the rise in recent years, up to 13,438 in 2023, compared to 12,778 in 2020, though within that combined number for last year, the Irish crop rose...