Maybe, a Galileo filly unbeaten in five starts but unraced since August, will be heavily favored to win Sunday’s Group 1 English 1000 Guineas for 3-year-old fillies at Newmarket racecourse.
Trained by Aidan O’Brien for the partnership of Derrick Smith, Michael Tabor and Sue Magnier, Maybe won four consecutive stakes to end her 2011 campaign, including the Group 1 Moyglare Stud Stakes in Ireland last August. She was the joint champion 2-year-old filly of 2011 with Elusive Kate.
Aidan O’Brien has 30-1 shot Daddy Long Legs for Saturday’s Kentucky Derby, but about five hours earlier at Newmarket he’ll saddle the hot favorite Camelot for the Group 1 English 2000 Guineas.
Camelot is one of 18 horses in the first European classic race of the season, a one-mile tilt up the famed Rowley Mile course at Newmarket. England has been waterlogged this spring, but the Newmarket course has dried somewhat in recent days and is forecast to be on the soft side of good Saturday.
Beat Black, a 5-year-old who had never won a graded stakes, pulled a shocking upset in Sunday’s spring running of the $3.4 million Tenno Sho for older horses at Kyoto Racecourse in Japan, winning the Grade 1 race over about two miles by four lengths at the staggering odds of 158-1.
The victory was the first Grade 1 win for jockey Syu Ishibashi and the third career Grade 1 win for trainer Hitoshi Nakamura. He won his first Grade 1 race in 1984.
Iron horse Cirrus des Aigles began his 2012 European season the same way he ended a Cartier-award-winning 2011, with an impressive win in a Group 1 race.
Just four weeks after a game win in the Group 1 Sheema Classic in Dubai, Cirrus des Aigles scored a dominant front-running victory Sunday at Longchamp in Paris, taking the Group 1 Prix Ganay by eight lengths over the talented filly Giofra. Sunday’s blowout triumph showcased Cirrus des Aigles’s versatility: In Dubai, he won over 1 ½ miles on a firm course, while the Prix Ganay was contested over about 1 ¼ miles on soft going.
Racing over radically soft going, even by European standards, Imperial Monarch and Colombian scored Group 3 victories on Saturday at Sandown in England.
Three-year-old Imperial Monarch came from last to capture the Bet365 Classic for trainer Aidan O’Brien. He was ridden by O’Brien’s son, Joseph, who described the course as “bottomless” in places and found better going on the wide outside. Imperial Monarch could wind up in the Epsom Derby, but Aidan O’Brien already has the hot ante-post favorite for that race in Camelot.
Black Caviar needed minimal effort to extend her unbeaten streak to 20 races in Saturday’s Group 1 Sportingbet Classic at Morphettville Racecourse, near Adelaide, Australia.
The winning streak is a record for an Australian-based horse racing at that country’s major tracks. Two Australian horses have compiled 22-race winning streaks racing at minor venues.
With his old rival and defending champion Ambitious Dragon sitting out the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Cup on Sunday at Sha Tin in Hong Kong, it could be California Memory’s turn to step into the spotlight, but to do so, California Memory must rebound from a subpar performance March 31 in the Dubai Duty Free, where he finished 12th.
The Cirrus des Aigles that finished third one year ago in the Prix Ganay was not the Cirrus des Aigles that heads the 2012 edition of the Group 1 Ganay on Sunday at Longchamp. The horse of a year ago was a solid Group 2 gelding, apparently well set in the European hierarchy after three seasons of racing. But since that time, Cirrus des Aigles, now 6, has moved forward and taken a position at the very head of European middle-distance horses.