PRIX EUGENE ADAM

PRIX EUGENE ADAM

Saint-Cloud 28th June 2026

A very small field turn out for this year’s Prix Eugene Adam may well have dampened some of the enthusiasm for a race that was won by last year’s Arc winner Daryz in 2025 when he got the better of Bay City Roller. The Fabre yard having 3 of the 4 runners didn’t help, but I try to find the positives in any race, especially one with a €119,000 purse (excl. premiums). There is a positive to take from this race, but it doesn’t come from the new Fabre training partnership. Overnight was very disappointing and having been sent off at odds of 1.8 PMU, I don’t think this defeat can solely be attributed to the step up in class. A reading of 3,2 on the penetrometer is about as fast as it can get at Saint-Cloud, but he ran on similar ground when winning the Listed Prix Ridgway at Paris Longchamp earlier in the month. He seemed to be struggling with 600m to run and wasn’t able to get himself on terms with the winner at any point and was beaten with relative ease in the end. His stablemate Baroud, ridden by Oisin Murphy who was drafted in as a late replacement for the injured Pierre-Charles Boudot, eventually came through for 2nd place, but this race was only ever about one horse and that was Pearled Majesty.

He finished 9th in the Prix du Jockey Club, but the Ballydoyle runners controlled that race from the front and anything further back simply needed to be forgiven, especially those drawn on the extremes that ended up behind that early pace. He broke well enough, but was slightly lit up when the Ballydoyle pacemakers came across him after 200m and from there, he was always on the back foot. Aside from that run at Chantilly, it has been a flawless year for this son of Persian King, who added this Group 2 to his earlier Group 3 success in the Prix Noailles in April. This was a Christophe Soumillon masterclass as he controlled the race from the moment that the stalls opened,  coming across to hold the rail after initially staying wide for the first 500m of the contest. Once in front, the brake pedal was applied and the pace dropped as low as 13.76s for the 7th furlong. Stacking this small field as they rounded the bend, he then applied an injection of pace once inside the final 500m and from there the race was his. If there are young jockeys looking to learn how to ride Saint-Cloud, this would be example 1A in the textbook. A finishing speed of 105% would suggest this race followed that exact pattern, but whilst the overall time was slightly faster than Daryz in 2025, their closing 600m times that were nearly 3s apart, with Daryz coming in at a finishing speed of 116%. 

If we take the Prix du Jockey Club form off the table, then Mauricio Delcher Sanchez’s Colt has done little wrong this year. He does hold an entry in the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe and it seems that at this stage, his connections are keen to have a go. He’s going the right way and certainly worth another try at Group 1 level, but the similarities between Pearled Majesty and Daryz are really only limited to the race that they have won at the end of June. The other 3 runners in Sunday’s contest have no business being considered as contenders for the Arc and so Pearled Majesty will need to improve significantly between now and October before he can truly be added to the shortlist. That’s certainly possible, but I’d have him running to a round 105-107 on Sunday, which gives an idea of the size of the gap I believe he needs to close.