Blast From The Past: Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe

After Frankel had won the 2012 Juddmonte International so impressively, he was briefly quoted at odds of 1/4 – with a run – for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. But, ending his career in the Champion Stakes at Ascot instead, Frankel retired without having run over the classic European distance of a mile and a half. Other great champions of the past, though, have cemented their reputations with victories over that trip, none better than French colt Sea-Bird, whose rating of 145 in 1965, a season in which he won the Derby and the Arc, was the highest ever awarded to a horse in Racehorses and remained so until Frankel came along nearly fifty years later.

At Epsom, ‘he beat his twenty-one opponents without coming off the bit’ said an incredulous Racehorses, asking ‘has there ever been an easier or a more impressive Derby winner?

Sea-Bird was chased home in the Derby by Meadow Court who franked the form by winning the Irish Derby and then beat Britain’s best older horses Soderini and Oncidium in the King George at Ascot. It was one thing for Sea-Bird to beat his fellow three-year-olds impressively in the Derby, but it was his performance against a star-studded international line-up of classic winners and some top older horses in the Arc that long stood as the best performance on the Flat in Timeform’s experience.

Easy winner of the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud after Epsom, Sea-Bird was 6/5 favourite on the pari-mutuel at Longchamp in a field that included Meadow Court again (along with the pair he beat at Ascot), as well as the unbeaten Prix du Jockey Club and Grand Prix de Paris winner Reliance, another top-class French three-year-old in Diatome, the Prix de Diane winner Blabla, America’s champion three-year-old colt Tom Rolfe (winner of the Preakness Stakes and placed in the other two legs of the Triple Crown) and, further emphasising the international nature of the line-up, the Russian Derby winner Anilin.

Racehorses takes up the story of the race approaching the home turn where Sea-Bird was going well in fifth place with Tom Rolfe and Reliance not far behind:  

‘At that point any one of half a dozen or more could win. Then suddenly, as if by magic, two horses came away from the remainder, one – the winner of the French Derby, the French St Leger and the Grand Prix de Paris, and never beaten in its life before – quite unable to get within challenging distance of the other. And so Sea-Bird won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. The six-length verdict in his favour would have been more had he not drifted across the course in the last furlong. Five lengths behind the runner-up Reliance, Diatome brought home the rest of the field.’

Suffice to say the form worked out. Sea-Bird won the first ever Racehorse Association’s ‘Horse of the Year’ Award and was named ‘Horse of the Century’ by John Randall and Tony Morris in their millennium book A Century of Champions, while his Australian-born jockey Pat Glennon simply described him as “by far the best horse I have ever seen – let alone ridden.”