French Racing / La Casaque Noire / 24 December 2007 / Leave a comment

In the last of his regular Monday columns for Betfair, La Casaque Noire rounds up the state of play in French racing...

Andre Fabre has won 20 consecutive trainer's championships, and in a few days time will be crowned champion for the 21st time.

It's not just a case of him keeping going and waiting for age or fashion to catch up with him, but he's actually pushing the barriers even higher and becoming even more dominant. This year he's on course for a near record season in money terms, his inmates having won just over six million Euros. This is a mark that he's surpassed for three consecutive years, and a big leap from the meagre €3m he earned back in 2002 - and that's without a single group one winner amongst his three-year-olds. Fabre once again has the numerical power that he had in the 1990s - he's sent out 187 different horses - and has had 150 victories. These sort of statistics make fodder of talk that at 60-years-old the great man is thinking of, or perhaps should be, hanging up his training cap.

Of course, one day he will lose his crown, and in the unlikely even it happens this decade, it will probably be Pau-based Jean-Claude Rouget who takes it. He's been around a few years himself, and although in recent seasons he's sent out more winners than anyone else, the quality is not quite up to the power boasted by the Parisian trainers. However, that's beginning to change, with owners more and more content to keep top-notch horses like Literato in the provinces.

On the jockeys front, Stephane Pasquier takes his first "Cravache d'Or" (jockeys championship), having ridden 184 winners, 12 clear of former champion Ioritz Mendizabal, who was making a decent race of it until picking-up a crazy two week ban for dangerous riding earlier this month. These two will probably be fighting it out again next year, with the young gun Alexis Badel (60 winners this year) a possible contender. It's interesting to see Christophe Soumillon settling for quality over quantity, his total being 'just' 146, well shy of his record 226 in 2005.

On the jumping scene, once again there was little in it between the big two of recent seasons, Arnaud Chaille-Chaille just out-pointing Guillaume Macaire, with a shade under €4m in his coffers. The continued dominance of these two is illustrated by the fact that third-placed Francois Cottin is €2m adrift.

Jacques Ricou wins the jump jockey's crown with 127 wins, nearly identical to his annual tally since his first title back in 2005. Christophe Pieux, who seemed to have won the title forever up until this time (in fact he won it 15 times) once again finished runner-up. The 'Iron Man', a name he has as much for his toughness as the amount of metal holding his body together, has ridden over 2,000 winners in France and recently recorded his first winner in Britain, on Millenium Royale for Francois Doumen. He's done everything in French racing but still has one ambition left - to ride in the Grand National. That'll be worth watching, as the shortness of his stirrups puts most flat jockeys to shame.

Tags: Andre Fabre, Stephane Pasquier