Prixdelahorse Tracker - Serenissimus

Bjorn Nielsen has had to be very patient with Serenissimus, who was a €180,000 yearling at Arqana in 2022. He has had entries at both 2 and 3, so the fact that he was making his debut in the early March of his 4-year-old season would point to the fact that he hasn’t been the easiest horse to train. A gelding by Camelot, he is a half-brother to Fort Vega (Lavery) and Vespertilio (McReery) and a three-quarters brother to English King (Ed Walker) and an SP of  3.1 (Fav) on the PMU would suggest that Francis-Henri Graffard had managed to get plenty of work into him at home to get him ready for this debut effort. Settled behind the pace by Mickael Barzalona, they were clearly keen to give him racing room and having made his challenge down the outside of the field, he made up a decent amount of ground to ultimately win by over 2 lengths. The 2nd placed Dark Secret is now 0-5, but he has an official rating of 38 and ran on nicely in the closing stages, whilst the 3rd placed Kirovsky had been 2nd on both starts last season and having had the run of the race in front, he appeared to run his race in the Alain Jathiere colours. As older horse maidens go, this wasn’t the worst by any means and the only horse to take out of it would be Serenissimus.

This is the first link up between Francis-Henri Graffard and Bjorn Nielsen that I could find and it may well bring about further connections in the future. I was impressed enough with this debut to think that there are more races to be won with Serenissimus, but whilst he runs in the same colours as Stradivarius, I think he has a long way to go before he can be mentioned in the same sentence as Nielsen’s great stayer, if he ever is. He has perhaps run to a mark of around 38-39 kilos to make a winning debut and it shouldn’t be overlooked that this was a €8,250 Fontainebleau maiden for 4-year-olds and over in early March. It was a lovely place to start a horse who will surely stay further than this 2,000m trip in time and he received a nice educational ride from Barzalona. The staying division in France, much like in the UK, is not the deepest and so there should be plenty of options for Francis-Henri Graffard to win more races with this son of Camelot, though I would suggest that he is likely to reach his peak in Listed or Group 3 company rather than going all the way to the top. This was a really promising debut and the link up between trainer and owner is a fascinating one, but I don’t want to get too carried away. If he is well placed, which he almost certainly will be, then there is every chance he could run up a sequence, which may lead to further connections in the future. For that reason I wanted to add him to the tracker, but there will be better horses to make winning debuts for the yard, as there have been already this year and that fact shouldn’t be lost when assessing the form of  Serenissimus.