Sea Of Class fighting for her life after stomach operation
Vets battle to save top class filly for paddocks Too Darn Hot finally returns to winning ways
Enable may have made a triumphant return to the racecourse at Sandown Park on Saturday as she prepares to try to win a unique third Prix de L’arc de Triomphe, but there will be no repeat of last year’s Arc because the filly she narrowly beat, Sea Of Class, is fighting for her life after an emergency operation on her stomach.
It is the capricious nature of the sport that while her trainer William Haggas sent out 33 winners in June and had a four-timer on Saturday, which he described as a “welcome distraction”, his Newmarket yard had been devastated by Sea Of Class’s life-threatening condition.
The filly required stomach surgery, always complicated with an animal as large as a horse, on Wednesday. “At the moment she is at the vets and receiving intensive care and doing as well as can be expected,” said Haggas in a statement.
“It’s devastating for Mrs Tsui [her owner-breeder] and her family as well as the team at Somerville Lodge.
“She is not out of the woods yet but she is battling away. She won’t race again, that is for sure, but with luck she will recover to lead a full life and be able to breed.”
Last year Sea Of Class won both the Irish Oaks and Yorkshire Oaks before her fast-finishing short-neck second behind Enable in the Arc.
The great thing about that race was that the two British fillies had such contrasting styles of racing, Enable being ridden up with the pace, Sea Of Class having to be dropped out from her bad draw in stall 15.
Negotiating her way to the front in a big field was always going to be fraught and, although James Doyle had to switch her round horses in the straight, the line came just too late. Her connections, quite rightly, looked forward to this year’s race as unfinished business.
Last month she finished a staying-on fifth on her reappearance in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Ascot. It was a creditable start after the ground had gone against her.
Enable, who is now 11 wins from 12 starts, was winning her eighth Group One but her first over the Coral-eclipse distance of a mile and a quarter. She will head for the King George, a race she won two years ago, then York – John Gosden was keeping his options open whether that will be in the International or Yorkshire Oaks – and the Arc.
Gosden and Dettori completed a Group One double for the weekend when Too Darn Hot, last year’s champion two-year-old, finally got his head in front as a three-year-old when running out a comfortable winner of the Prix Jean Prat, over the new distance of seven furlongs, at Deauville yesterday. Sent off the 5-6 favourite, he beat his compatriots Space Blues and Fox Champion by three lengths and two.
Having been beaten in the Dante, Irish Guineas and St James’s Palace, yesterday was more like the Too Darn Hot of last year. “We’ve finally got him over the right trip,” said the trainer. “We’ll stop running him over stiff miles or mile and quarters. The horse got us out of trouble, not us!”