PRIX DES HARAS NATIONAUX - MAHOLLIA

An early season AQPS race for the 4-year-olds and one of the first to come off the All-Weather on to the turf. This race does have a habit of producing a decent horse. Last season the Mullins team recruited both La Valserine and then eventually Leader D’Allier from the field, but other horses like Jacks Parrot, Invincible Nao and Indiana Dream have all run in the race in recent years.

A going description of Very Soft 4,1 actually makes this one of the better surfaces that we have seen racing on so far in 2026 and the overall winning time of 3:14.16, albeit from a relatively small sample of races over this 3,000m trip, would look to agree with that description.

The placed horses have some earlier form in the AQPS sphere that I could have looked at, but in reality there was only one horse to focus on and that was the winner, Mahollia. I watched back the last few renewals of the Prix des Haras Nationaux before writing this piece and at least visually, I can say that Mahollia was the most impressive winner of the race in recent years. Having been sent off at an SP of 2.7 (Fav) on the PMU, she had clearly been showing all the right signs at home, but I would still be happy to say that the manner of her victory and the ease with which she pulled away in the closing stages would suggest that she outran those market expectations all the same. She traveled beautifully for Leo-Paul Brechet and once switched to the inside rail halfway up the straight, she quickened readily despite the relatively motionless encouragement from her rider. The sectional timing data isn’t available at Fontainebleau so we can’t get anything more scientific than the overall time, but it is impossible to think that she wasn’t the fastest horse in this field and she cantered clear effortlessly to win by 6 lengths.

A well backed newcomer trained by Daniela Mele is not that unusual and given that she was bread by Guy Cherel, she will certainly have had a decent grounding to get her ready for this debut. She is an Ivanhowe filly whose dam is a half-sister to Irancy and Darasso. She should and almost certainly will jump a hurdle in time and has plenty of speed be effective there too. Whether she remains with Daniela Mele, who owns as well as trains the filly, is open to question and after such an impressive debut she will surely have some suitors. Either way, she is the best AQPS prospect that we have seen so far in 2026 and is worth noting for the future.