Prixdelahorse Tracker - Operator

Alright he’s a gelding. I’m not going to open up the geldings running in the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe debate on this blog and it does seem that the best geldings in France are almost exclusively trained by Francis-Henri Graffard. However, I’m going to just park the “G” next to his name for a moment and talk about the impressive debut that Operator made at Clairefontaine on Monday afternoon under Mickael Barzalona. 

Operator is a 3-year-old by Night of Thunder and having made €850,000 as a yearling when he went through the ring at Arqana. Purchased by Blandford Bloodstock, he has joined the growing ranks of Wathnan Racing and given his pedigree, it is easy to see why such an investment was made. His dam, Enchanting Skies, won a couple of races for Andre Fabre and achieved a French rating of 44-kilos after finishing 2nd in the Listed Prix de Thiberville over 2,400m in 2018. She ran to a fair level, but she has already achieved a better standard as a broodmare than she did on the track. Her first foal was Beauvatier, who hit the frame in no less than four Group 1 races for Yann Barberot. She has also produced Lhakpa, who was placed in the G3 Prix Miesque as a juvenile and is herself a half-sister to the German G1 winner Empoli. It’s a relatively stellar pedigree and whilst the fact that we have had to wait until the July of his 3-year-old season and the fact that he has been gelded already are slight reasons for caution, there were a lot of positives to take from Operator’s debut performance.

Having been sent off at 1.6 PMU for this debut run, Operator had clearly been showing the right signs on the gallops at home. In part that price probably reflects the fact that this wasn’t a particularly deep 3-year-old maiden on paper and the placed horses returned at prices of 47 and 13 respectively. It was also a slightly farcical affair in the early stages and the winning time of 2:45.60 was 10s slower than the Fillies over the same course and distance later on the card. Having been very slow to leave the stalls he had to be driven along to get back on terms and Mickael Barzalona was keen to overcome that slow start to get his mount to the front. Once in front, he settled perfectly and from the time they reached the start of the back straight, Barzalona was able to control the fractions in front. The order remained largely unchanged and once they rounded the final turn, Operator was woken up with a couple of reminders and he picked up readily to put distance between himself and the rest, ultimately maintaining a margin of over 2 lengths as he won eased down.

There’s clearly a considerable amount of caution needed until we can test this form more thoroughly, but given the way that the race panned out, the fact that Operator was able to put a considerable amount of distance between himself and the rest is what really caught the eye. Francis-Henri Graffard and Wathnan Racing are persisting and that should be a sign by itself.