The fact of the matter is that the bar has rarely if ever been so low in an Arc, the highest-rated 120 when it normally takes nearer 130 to win it, this renewal lesser in history but greater in mystery.
But the beauty of an Arc, and of this fairly fledgling field, is that a star could still easily emerge.
Let’s look in detail at the contenders…
Climbed the Reynier way – like a spaniel scaling stairs – for a while and went from breaking his maiden in April 2023 to going off favourite for a Group One in April 2024, overwhelmed in the Prix d’Ispahan as he was in the Juddmonte International last time, but in between he finished second to Auguste Rodin in the Prince Of Wales’s Stakes, albeit flattered by a pull-apart pace. He’ll be in the market for picking up any pieces in the finish, relying on the race running hot and rivals running cold.
Sixth-favourite but eleventh-best in the 2023 Arc. The horse is the same force now, at the least, defeating Dubai Honour in a Group One at Baden-Baden last month, and this year’s Arc maps to be more of a stamina test, to his benefit. On paper he’s not good enough, though the same was said of the last German-trained Arc challenger who won a Group One at three-years-old and the Grosser Preis von Baden at four, and he was called Torquator Tasso.
Nine of the last 16 Arc winners have been fillies, two each for Treve and Enable, easy to forget that Enable had to be supplemented for her first, and if it was a no-brainer for her it has certainly been a ‘brainer’ for the management team of Bluestocking who isn’t an Enable or a Treve, but she has a poster girl in Alpinista who likewise was greater than the sum of her parts. It’s not her rating but her range, not her quality but her qualities, that will get Bluestocking far in what looks an ordinary Arc.
If her poster girl is Alpinista, her poster boy is Charyn, her and him winless as three-year-olds but cultivating a class and a cutting edge that has propelled them to unforeseeable heights in 2024, Bluestocking bowing to only four horses through five races this season, including the top trio in the world on turf according to the Longines rankings: City Of Troy, Calandagan and Goliath.
Most horses ahead of her in the betting are bringing a blank cheque, borrowing against their reputation, but she has credit in the bank, with a currency in competition, and this may be an austerity Arc without big spenders.
Beaucoup de rain is forecast for Paris on Sunday, but will it be sufficient in amount and timeframe to help Aventure, whose best and probably only chance of winning an Arc is in a mudbath, remembering how she glided through gluey conditions for a wide-margin win in the Prix de Royaument, a performance which propelled her to favourite for the French Oaks a fortnight later (finished a close fourth on less-testing ground).
At least the Vermeille confirmed she belongs at this level, and the tracking data from that race makes for interesting reading, as in each of the four furlongs between five furlongs out and one furlong out Aventure was faster than Bluestocking, telling of right moves at wrong times and a savvy ride on the winner by Rossa Ryan.
The first of eight Arcs for Andre Fabre was 1987 with Trempolino whose Arc approach was to be placed in the French Derby and then onto the Grand Prix de Paris before a break and a successful stepping stone in the Prix Niel.
Here we are, 37 years on, and Sosie has followed the same pathway to Paris, the classic trail for the classical trainer. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you tasked AI with generating an Arc favourite then it would look a lot like Sosie, a Fabre-fashioned three-year-old with that trajectory and those tentpoles, but is Sosie super or superficial, a question of whether the progressive profile is propped up by pillars that are fairly flimsy?
An official rating of 119 is light relative to his CV and tells a tale of a set of races that aren’t quite up to their normal standard, intertwined with Look de Vega, in between beating Illinois, who settled for second to stablemates subsequently.
In two dimensions he looks great, in 3D less so, due to some doubts about his depth and the French three-year-olds collectively outside of Calandagan who has been swimming in different, deeper waters, and the Arc favourite is usually the dominant force rather than a developing force.
It looked and felt as if, for Bluestocking and Aventure, the Prix Vermeille was an end game, but more of a means to an end for Survie, who was back from a break spared a hard race. She had finished in front of Aventure when a super second to Sparkling Plenty in the Prix de Diane, form that entitles her to a place in the Arc, but not a place on the podium.
Delius is the sponsored version of Sosie on Amazon. He lived up to his reputation on his first three starts and was favourite over Sosie for the Grand Prix de Paris, set too much to do in that, but their relationship was roughly the same when Delius sat handier in the Prix Niel, Delius finishing second and a smidgen slower than Sosie through the last 600m when he had been a fraction faster in their July meet.
He has identical pace and power to Sosie but the difference is in maturity or motivation, hard to reform in an Arc, but there is a strongly-run scenario where Delius shines brighter than before, and Jean Claude-Rouget’s record in the last five Arcs reads two winners and a second, third and fourth.
τ = F × r × sin(θ). The formula for calculating torque, the force by which screws are tightened, the critical issue for Look de Vega, as to how much brighter and tighter he can be from disappointing defeat in the Prix Niel, in the context of the race against time between trial and target.
It has been done before, three times in the last 20 years, by Treve, Solemia and Bago, who all rebounded from trials day, and in 1997 even the great Peintre Celebre was overturned in the Niel, though out of luck rather than out of shape that day.
Knowing what we do now, I revisited the Prix du Jockey Club in the expectation of reverse engineering some sense for Sosie leap-frogging Look de Vega by now, but not a bit of it, Look De Vega superior at every stage in every respect, his poise and power so striking for one having only his third race, looking every inch an Arc horse, physiologically and propulsively, being a big, long-striding cruiser with a change of pace.
He’s still the horse in the field with the “X-factor”, albeit downgraded by deflation in the Niel from upper case to a lower case “X”. The trouble with trust is the inherent risk, and Look De Vega’s tower of trust is Jenga-esque: you’ve got to trust your own instincts from Chantilly, to trust the training team to sharpen the soft edges from trials day, and to trust that the horse will stay better than his sire did in the Arc.
Confucious said that life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated. The swiftest and simplest summary of this year’s Arc is that Al Riffa is the best bet because he has the best chance for obvious reasons. He’s a true top-notcher in a field with peculiarly few and gave the mighty City Of Troy a scare at Sandown before relishing his first go at 12 furlongs by running away with a German Group One which has been a surprisingly successful segue to the Arc.
Okay, so neither City Of Troy nor the Grosser Preis von Berlin were at their highest standards when Al Riffa engaged with them, and the impending jockey change is no uplift, for all Yutake Take’s legendary status at home in Japan, but Al Riffa is an easy sell as a Group One horse at the peak of his powers who was made for 12 furlongs on soft ground.
Joseph O’Brien says Al Riffa has taken everything in his stride as he steps up his Arc preparation.
We’ve all had that sceptical sensation of looking at a word you’ve written a thousand times before and suddenly doubting whether it’s spelled correctly. It’s an example of jamais vu – ‘never seen’ – the opposite of déjà vu, when the familiar seems strangely new, and it applies, to some extent, to Los Angeles in the Arc.
An Aidan O’Brien runner in the Arc is very familiar indeed – there have been 56 of them over the years – but what’s strangely new is for him to have a horse so explicitly targeted at the race as Los Angeles has been, when Paris hasn’t seemed that much of a priority for O’Brien in the past. Patronising the race, yes, but pinpointing the race, not really.
Take those 56 Arc runners from Ballydoyle: only a quarter of them started at single-figure odds, and as many as a dozen were in as pacemakers.
The two Arc winners for O’Brien, Dylan Thomas and Found, both went via the Irish Champion, swelling the significance of Los Angeles being set that ill-fitting assignment when the St Leger was at his mercy from the winding, grinding way he won the Irish Derby and the Great Voltigeur. But Ryan Moore, who has ridden him only in those two races, hinted at the deceptive dynamism within Los Angeles when he said after York that ‘he doesn’t need to go any further.’
Leopardstown isn’t his track, nor 12 furlongs his trip, and therefore to finish fourth – beaten just a length – in the Irish Champion was some achievement and some Arc trial, more so examining the data, as his 24.52 secs was a fastest final quarter-mile of any horse in that fab field, faster than Economics, Auguste Rodin or Shin Emperor.
His sire Camelot might have done better than seventh in the 2012 Arc without a slog in the St Leger, lessons learnt for Los Angeles, whose third dam, Allez Les Trois, is a half-sister to Arc royalty in Urban Sea.
Something about Los Angeles has informed Aidan or Ryan or both that he’s not just a horse to run in the Arc but a horse to prime for the Arc, emboldened by an environment where Calandagan can’t and City Of Troy won’t.
If you can’t beat them, copy them. In need of a broadcasting mast, as well as a monument to their post-war recovery, Japan looked longingly at France and constructed their version of the Eiffel Tower, the Tokyo Tower, similarly striking and strikingly similar, only 30 metres higher, naturally.
After trying and failing to win an Arc for 55 years, encompassing 31 runners, Japan has experimentally and essentially done with an Arc winner what it did with the Eiffel Tower and built a replica. Well, bought a replica, the full-brother of Sottsass having cost €2.1m at the Arquana sales in 2022.
Faithfully or fatefully following the blueprint, Shin Emperor made his Arc approach via the Irish Champion Stakes and not only went one place better than Sottsass managed but also left a strong sense of what might have been had he got going sooner, much like the Japanese Derby in which he flew home for third.
Ready, willing and able. His performances at Tokyo and Leopardstown suggest that he’s able enough for an Arc, certainly this Arc, but it’s the ‘ready’ and ‘willing’ parts of the contract that can’t yet be signed off, watching his process in both of his biggest races and the hint of hesitancy from him.
That said, his presence and his provenance are the sincerest form of flattery: the Japanese concept of Shuhari is a method of imitation that can help develop ideas to completion, and Shin Emperor is an imitation by iteration of the 2020 Arc winner.
His record since the spring paints a stark picture of his strengths and his shortcomings. His unbeaten sequence in staying events at Group Two/Three level has been wrapped around a heavy defeat in a 12-furlong Group One, and that Group One (the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud) was nothing like this Group One. Shortcoming incoming.
What a place for your final race, as it will be for him, due to retire. He won’t be in the mix in the finish but will do better than last year when beating just one home, because the ground won’t be so fast and, moreover, he’s a better horse aged five, even grabbing a Group One (a sub-standard Ganay) in the spring.
As many as 15 Arc winners had been beaten in the race the year before and, rewinding 12 months, you could see a scenario where Continuous became number 16, following a fine fifth amid scrimmaging and a speedway circuit. However, his four-year-old campaign has never caught fire, feeding on scraps in the Royal Whip before brushed aside in the Prix Foy, looking to have lost his mojo, and the official handicapper has acted accordingly by reducing his rating from 120 to 114.
But no sooner do you think you’re over him than you think back to those good times last year, remind yourself he’s trained by a genius, and begin to find excuses for the more recent version. Continuous is the ex you sporadically and surreptitiously check out still on Facebook.
Sunway is the supporting actor who has been in some big productions but lacks the chops to be a leading man. You can unravel the ball of string that is Sunway to find the form-lines which not only explain but endorse him, closely matched with Los Angeles from the Irish Derby and within hailing distance of Look De Vega and Sosie in the French equivalent, but he’s reprised the same role for so long that Sunway is now typecast as a bit-part player, the St Leger the latest case in point.
The post-Covid blight on British business is apparently ‘quiet quitting’, the workplace trend whereby employees meet the minimum requirement of their job but withhold any extra effort. Put it that way and Mqse De Sevigne could be called a quiet quitter, scheming scrambles her specialist subject, but she could teach a class in showing what she needs rather than what she’s got, as testified by five Group One wins by margins of a short neck, a nose, a short head, a length and a head.
It may be more than coincidence that she’s by Siyouni like Laurens, another filly who made a career out of photo finishes in Group 1s, but whereas Laurens was legit, Mqse De Sevigne appears rather more When Harry Met Sally with her crescendos.
Do her hidden depths include stamina? Because she’s into the unknown trip-wise, but Andre Fabre said at the start of her campaign that she’d be ending it in an Arc, and as many as four of her half-siblings were successful at 12 furlongs and further, including multiple Group One winner Meandre, who contested two Arcs.
She may not quit so quietly as odds of 25/1 suggest.
In the absence of a heavyweight older horse, this Arc will go the way of whichever three-year-old improves the most, sparring partners Sosie and Look de Vega having plenty to recommend them, as does Japanese raider Shin Emperor, but there’s something of a brewing storm about LOS ANGELES, whose developing tools and talent has persuaded Aidan O’Brien to prepare him for Paris in a way that very few from Ballydoyle have ever been.
His style from York and his sectionals from Leopardstown make Los Angeles the perfect fit for this Arc in particular, likely to turn on brute force more than brilliance.
