Enable could face a test in return

After taking forever to make her 2018 debut, the great – yes, great – mare Enable is set to launch a less-delayed 2019 campaign Saturday at Sandown Park in England where she starts as the heavy favorite in the Group 1 Eclipse Stakes.

Setbacks kept Enable from racing last year at age 4 until Sept. 8, but she is such a remarkable horse that despite a hasty preparation – and another minor problem incurred following her comeback race – she still won her second Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and 27 days later became the first horse to win the Arc and the Breeders’ Cup Turf in the same season.

John Gosden, who trains Enable for Khalid Abdullah, first targeted the Coronation Cup at Epsom for Enable’s debut this year, then switched to the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot, and finally is set to unveil his stable star Saturday at a course where she has yet to race. There is no reason for Gosden to have been in any sort of hurry since the prime motivating factor for Enable’s return this year at 5 is the attempt to make her the first three-time Arc winner.

Enable cuts back to a trip under 1 ½ miles for the first time since she finished third in a conditions race in April 2017, before Enable really had become Enable, and the last time she lost a race. Her win streak stands at nine. The Eclipse’s 1 ¼-mile distance clearly falls short of Enable’s best, but horses of her caliber have a way of making do with the circumstances placed before them.

Yet the Eclipse, even if Enable copes adequately with the shorter distance, is no stroll in the park, and topping the competition is another female, the 4-year-old filly Magical, who gave Enable all she wanted in the BC Turf, going down to a three-quarters of a length defeat in the end. Magical gets two pounds from her older foe, is race-hardened this season with four starts, thrives at 1 ¼ miles, and her second-place finish last out in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes could be put down to soft ground. The Sandown course was listed good-to-firm as of Thursday, and Magical could be catching Enable under just the right conditions.

Three-year-old Telecaster sharply won the Dante Stakes at York before flopping in the Derby at Epsom. The 4-year-old Regal Reality has been taking betting this week. The Michael Stoute-trained colt’s two starts this year, both comfortable wins, have come over the Sandown course, and he was dominant capturing the Group 3 Brigadier Gerard over this same trip on May 23.