Jarvis, longtime leading British trainer, to retire

Michael Jarvis, one of Britain’s leading trainers for many decades, announced his imminent retirement on Tuesday because of ill health. The trainer of Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner Carroll House and five-time Group 1 winner Rakti, Jarvis suffers from prostate cancer and has recently undergone heart surgery.

Jarvis, 72, began his training career in 1968 and for many years has been headquartered at Kremlin House Stables in Newmarket, England, where he is in charge of 120 horses. He said that he would give up all of his training duties after tying up loose ends and hand over the reins of Kremlin House to his 10-year assistant Roger Varian.

In addition to winning the 1989 Arc, Carroll House won two other Group 1 races for Jarvis, the Irish Champion Stakes and the Grosser Preis von Baden. Rakti’s five big victories between 2003 and 2005 came in the Premio Presidente della Repubblica, the Champion Stakes, the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes and the Lockinge Stakes.

Jarvis also saddled the winners of five European classics. They are Holding Court in the 2000 Prix du Jockey-Club (French Derby), Ameerat in the 1000 Guineas in 2001, Eswarah in the 2005 English Oaks, and Proruturi and Morshdi in the Derby Italiano in 1989 and 2001. He won the Group 1 Haydock Park Sprint Cup three times with Tudor Music (1969), Green God (1971) and Petong (1984). His most recent big name horse was the gallivanting Pressing, the winner of the Group 1 Bayerisches Zuchtrennen and the Group 1 Premio Roma plus seven other group races in Italy and Turkey.

Pressing was Jarvis’s most recent American runner when he finished seventh in the 2007 Arlington Million. Jarvis’s best performer in America was the filly Ela Athena, a Group 3 winner in England who finished second and third in the Man o’ War in 2000 and 2001 and third in the 2000 Turf Classic.