A corner of western Paris is going to feel particularly green this weekend as French jump racing’s greatest prizes at Auteuil get targeted with a vengeance by Irish horses.
Almost half the field in Saturday’s €390,000 Grande Course De Haies D’Auteuil – France’s Champion Hurdle – are trained in Ireland, including Rachael Blackmore’s popular mount, Hewick.
Willie Mullins has four chances to secure a sixth win in the race, while Gavin Cromwell’s former double Stayers champion Flooring Porter also lines up in a race due off at 2.15 Irish-time and is live on Sky Sports.
A rare outcome could occur though in Sunday’s Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris, the most prestigious prize in French National Hunt racing, which hasn’t been won by an overseas horse in over 60 years.
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The last to manage it was England’s Mandarin under a famous Fred Winter ride in 1962. It is over a century since the Irish-trained Troytown was successful in 1919.
A year later Troytown won the Grand National at Aintree and the Emmet Mullins-trained Noble Yeats has a shot at pulling off the same famous double in reverse.
Last year’s Aintree hero is among the favourites for Sunday’s €900,000 highlight run over 6,000 metres around Auteuil’s historic circuit in the Paris suburbs.
He will be joined in the 18-runner race due off at 3.05 by the Willie Mullins pair, Franco De Port and Carefully Selected.
Blackmore also rides in France’s version of the Gold Cup, teaming up with Gressy Raiselle, trained by controversial local handler David Cottin.
In March he was handed a 12 month ban by France Galop for failing to observe the correct withdrawal times in the use of corticosteroids on four of his horses.
Last year, Cottin was also one of 21 people arrested from a number of different French stables in connection with alleged doping offences. He was subsequently released without charge.
With three other Irish hopefuls included for Sunday’s other Grade One, the Prix Alain Du Breil, off at 4.20, it is a major raiding party that might provoke some rueful local shrugs.
The rampant, if lucrative, purchasing of the best young French prospects by Irish connections in recent years appears like it is coming back to bite.
Three of Willie Mullins’s Champion Hurdle runners are French-bred and two of them began their careers in France before being bought.
Franco De Port, third in last year’s Grand-Steep is also French-bred and won at Auteuil before being snapped up by Willie Mullins.
From Hurricane Fly to this year’s Gold Cup hero Galopin Des Champs, the impact of talent sourced in France has underpinned Irish dominance of the jumps sphere over the last decade, particularly at the Cheltenham festival.
Now, even with the height of summer flat season looming, the depth of that dominance, as well perhaps as a greater familiarity with the French scene, is reflected in this weekend’s top-flight jumps action.
If Paris ‘Turfistes’ aren’t familiar with the colourful atmosphere that accompanies the remarkable bargain-buy Hewick, or the west of Ireland’s Flooring Porter Syndicate, then Irish success in France’s biggest jumps race is even more unfamiliar.
Rare attempts have included the legendary Captain Christy finishing runner-up in 1975. But to some veteran race fans, mention of Auteuil simply recalls Dawn Run’s fatal fall in the 1985 ‘Grand Course’.
That has never dissuaded Willie Mullins from exploiting its lucrative prizemoney and victory in the Grand-Steep remains one of his greatest ambitions. He concedes though that his nephew could beat him to the punch.
Emmet Mullins’s stratospheric rise through the training ranks has been underpinned by a readiness to defy convention.
Noble Yeats was the first seven-year-old to win at Aintree since 1940, while the career path of his first Grade One winner, Feronily, is unmatched.
A point-to-point winner in November, he went from losing a pair of bumpers, to winning a maiden hurdle, and then landing a Grade One chase at Punchestown on just his second start over fences, all of it in six months.
Now he is pitched into Saturday’s Champion Hurdle with a chance to potentially set up an unlikely big race double.
If Irish bookmakers marginally favour Klassical Dream in the Champion Hurdle betting to go one better that last year, they are taking no chances with Feronily at a general 9-1.
However, Noble Yeats is a 5-2 favourite with Paddy Power to pull off a feat that mightn’t strictly be unprecedented but would still constitute a notable landmark.
Emmet Mullins only took out his licence to train in 2016 and despite his accomplishments is still one of the youngest handlers in the business at 33. Noble Yeats’ Welsh jockey Sean Bowen has never ridden at Auteuil before.
Together they look to have a favourite’s chance at landing one of international steeplechasing’s greatest prizes.
