Perhaps the most contentious field in the 150-year history of the Prix de la Foret tops the bill on the first day of Arc Weekend at Longchamp Saturday when 13 horses line up for the seven-furlong Group 1 contest worth $352,000.

Tony Ryan, the owner of the breeding farms Castleton Lyons in Lexington, Ky., and Lyons Demesne in Co. Kildare, Ireland, died at Lyons Demesne on Wednesday. He was 71.

The biggest weekend of the European racing season gets under way Friday at Newmarket with the running of two key juvenile Group 1s, the Middle Park Stakes for colts and the Cheveley Park Stakes for fillies. Both run at six furlongs and worth $347,000, they kick off a three-day cross-channel cornucopia of championship-class racing that will climax on Sunday at Longchamp with the 86th running of the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.

A $3.4 million Sadler's Wells filly brought a glamorous note to Tuesday's second session of the Goffs Million yearling sale in Ireland and helped reverse declines at Monday's opening session.

A gray daughter of Albanova sold for about $3,408,000, to Coolmore representative Demi O'Byrne, easily topping the day's selling. The filly is out of an Alzao mare who was champion older mare in Germany in 2004.

The ground could play a key role in Sunday’s Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp, where the going was officially described as very soft on Tuesday, a day when Epsom Derby winner Authorized headed a list of 15 possible runners for the 1 1/2-mile Group 1 race.

Britain's leading racing daily, The Racing Post, has been sold to FL Partners, an Irish private equity investment firm, for approximately $342 million. The paper was sold by the Times Mirror Group, which had been behind a short-lived American racing paper, The Racing Times, in 1991.

The new owner has named Alan Byrne as the Racing Post's new chief executive and editor-in-chief. Byrne, who had been editor of the Post from 1993 to 2002, has been serving as a consultant to Sheikh Mohammed's Godolphin Racing.

Ramonti looks to have sealed champion miler honors in Europe with a gutsy win in Saturday's Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot.

Benefitting from a tactically aware ride from Frankie Dettori, the Godolphin-owned Ramonti defeated Excellent Art, the 9-5 favorite, by a half-length.

Dettori sat in second on the 5-1 winner, as Excellent Art's Aidan O'Brien-trained stablemate Duke of Marmalade set a good pace. When Dettori asked his mount to quicken in the straight, Ramonti took up the running 1 1/2 furlongs out and responded well.

The mystery is over. George Washington's next start is likely to be the 1 1/4-mile Champion Stakes at Newmarket on Oct. 20. So said his trainer, Aidan O'Brien, on Friday, one day after the name of the two-time European champion was left out of the entry box for Saturday's one-mile Queen Elizabeth II Stakes.

O'Brien also mentioned the Breeders' Cup Mile as a possible next start for George Washington.

NEW YORK - Incest is an ugly word, descriptive of a practice well deserving its cultural taboo. In the Thoroughbred world it is usually referred to in its euphemistic form, inbreeding, a term more generally employed to note the presence of an ancestor who appears more than once in a horse's first five generations.

George Washington will very likely miss his intended engagement in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot on Saturday, putting his participation in the Breeders' Cup Mile on Oct. 27 in doubt.

The defending QE II titleholder was all but declared out of that Group 1 mile by trainer Aidan O'Brien, who said on Wednesday that his probable runners would be Excellent Art, winner of the St. James's Palace Stakes, and Duke of Marmalade, runner up in the Champion Stakes.