Prix Pot Au Feu - Yellow Jersey

A relatively short blog post to start the review of this weekend’s action in France. The Group 1 performances at Paris Longchamp will clearly take priority and rightly so (I’ll do my best to get some thoughts on those races on this blog in the next couple of days), but before we get to those races I want to go back to Friday afternoon at Saint-Cloud. Initially, this looked like being a relatively average card, but the newcomers maidens offered some hope for the future and there were a couple of nice winners. If you haven’t seen the performance of Andre Fabre’s Contorsion yet, a 10-length winner of the Fillies maiden, that’s worth a few minutes of your time. However, the horse to catch my eye was a winner 35-minutes later.

Yellow Jersey is a €400,000 yearling (Arqana) who runs for Andre Fabre in the Qatar Racing silks. These owners have already enjoyed success with another member of this family this season, Parachutiste and there is every chance that Yellow Jersey could be just as promising. His dam is a half-sister to the dam of Parachutiste, Paix, who was one of my favourite French Fillies in the last decade. She was tough and had that perfect blend of stamina and speed that is so important in French racing. Yellow Jersey is a son of Dubawi. Things clearly haven’t gone perfectly given that he was making his racecourse debut at the end of May and he has already been gelded. That will initially limit his options, but the French geldings have proved to be very strong in the last 18-months or so and after such a promising debut, he is worth noting for those group races that follow the classics.

A PMU Price of 10.0 would suggest that his connections weren’t entirely sure about him, but there was very little cause for concern once the race got underway. Settled in mid-division on the inside rail, he briefly looked short of room, but once the gap appeared he quickened readily, finishing his race strongly to win by 4-lengths. Some context is needed. Malone Favriaux is a competent apprentice who has ridden 14 winners so far this season, but a claim of 3.5-kilos clearly helped. This is a newcomers race, so it’s also hard to know exactly what he has beaten. The placed horses, Talgat and Kizlyar, both shaped like they may need further and both had headgear on for their debuts. The 4.3 PMU favourite, Tupero, had every chance but looked one paced in the closing stages. Unfortunately, the McLloyd sectional times aren’t available for this race, but what we can say is that the winning time of 2:44.64 was 2-seconds slower than the Fillies race, yet Yellow Jersey has been able to pull 4-lengths clear under a hands ride. His pedigree and the manner of his debut performance would suggest that he is an above average type and he is the first name into my tracker from this weekend’s action.