Enable gets test in comeback

The great mare Enable dives right into the deep end of the pool when she makes her 6-yearold debut Sunday at Sandown in a crackling renewal of the Group 1 Eclipse Stakes over 1 1/4 miles.

Enable began her 2019 season winning the Eclipse over the excellent filly Magical, but principal rival Ghaiyyath could pose an even greater challenge Sunday.

The question for Enable is whether she’s had too much time between starts, this being her first race since finishing second to Waldgeist on Oct. 6 in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.

The question for Ghaiyyath is whether he’s gotten enough time. Ghaiyyath, a fire-breathing powerhouse of a horse, has proved capable of running races that would beat nearly any horse in the world, but he goes hard on the front end, requires ample recovery time, and has struggled to string together top performances. He put forth one of those June 5, easily winning the Group 1 Coronation Cup over Anthony Van Dyck, but can trainer Charlie Appleby tune his horse to another crescendo only a month later?

Enable, in fact, is only back this year because she lost the Arc. Her owner, Khalid Abdullah, and trainer, John Gosden, raced her last year at 5 chiefly to try and make the mare the first three-time Arc winner, but she failed to follow up on her 2018 and 2019 triumphs. Enable, racing over a Longchamp course wetter than she prefers, took the lead in midstretch but had no answer for Waldgeist’s final move. Connections pondered Enable’s future for several days, then announced a 2020 campaign.

Gosden has cautioned, understandably, that Enable won’t be wound tight for the Eclipse, and indeed, one of only two losses in a 15-race career came in the first start of her 3-year-old season. But in 2018, Enable returned from an 11-month layoff and crunched top-class Crystal Ocean in an all-weather-track Arc prep, and last July, in her first start since the Arc, she held at bay fivetime Group 1-winner Magical, who had a race-fitness edge.

There was rain Friday, when the course was rated good, around Sandown, but the chance for more precipitation into the weekend is faint, good news for Ghaiyyath, who wants to stay atop the ground. Ghaiyyath

has won 7 of 10 starts himself, and when he gets churning relentlessly on the lead, he can be really brilliant as with a 14-length win last summer in the Group 1 Grosser Preis von Baden.

Trainer Aidan O’Brien lies in wait with Japan, who was fourth in the Arc and fourth in the Group 1 Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot, a race he needed for fitness. At his best last season, Japan beat Crystal Ocean over 1 5/16 miles in the International Stakes at York.

Also slated to start are two more formidable mares, Magic Wand and Deirdre. Both are legitimate Group 1 animals on their day – but the Eclipse Stakes is more than a merely legitimate Group 1.

Post time is set for 10:35 a.m. Eastern, and you can find this must-see race at DRFBets.com.