Ron Arculli, the owner of Red Verdon, will hope that the third time is the charm when his colt lines up for the Grand Prix de Paris in its temporary home at Saint-Cloud racecourse on Thursday evening. It will be Red Verdon’s third Group One race in a row and also the third time that Arculli has paid a five-figure supplementary fee to get his horse into the field. Victory on Thursday, worth just over a quarter of a million pounds, would put him back in front.
On the face of it Arculli’s ambitious campaign with Red Verdon over the last couple of months has not been a roaring success. It cost £75,000 to add the colt to the Derby at Epsom and another €100,000, or about £80,000, to run in the Irish equivalent three weeks later. Good runs to finish sixth and fourth recouped about £60,000 but left the owner about £100,000 out of pocket.
A punter would see it as a poor return on a gamble but Arculli and Ed Dunlop, Red Verdon’s trainer, can see a bigger picture. Another €43,200, or about £36,000, was required to get Red Verdon into the Grand Prix de Paris, one of the highlights of French racing’s summer season, and success would not only recoup all the entry fees but turn Red Verdon into a highly valuable stallion prospect.
“It’s easy to say but we felt he could have finished closer in the Derby and then we got too far back in the Irish Derby and he ran on very dramatically after the front two had gone,” Dunlop said on Wednesday. “It’s a last chance for him to take on his own age level in a Group One over a mile and a half and Ronnie Arculli is always up for something, as you can tell by the supplementaries.
“It looks open, though André Fabre has three in there and we’re playing on their doorstep but the horse is in good form.”
Red Verdon’s colours are familiar to racegoers around the world thanks to the exploits of Arculli’s remarkable stayer Red Cadeaux, who finished second in the Melbourne Cup three times, was the runner-up behind Animal Kingdom in the 2013 Dubai World Cup and won nearly £5m in prize money during his long career.
“At the beginning of his career Red Verdon was a breeze-up horse, so he couldn’t be entered in the Derby [as a yearling],” Dunlop said. “He was also rated 76 at the start of his three-year-old career, so he’s made huge strides. We considered the [Group Three] Bahrain Trophy and the [Group Two] Princess of Wales’s Stakes at the July meeting [last week] but Ronnie was very keen on this race and he’s very ambitious.
“He showed with Red Cadeaux that he’s more right than not right. Of course, at the moment he hasn’t got his money back but, if he’d been a short-head closer in Ireland, he’d have easily got his money back for that race.
“You can look at it any way you like but every big race we turn to now seems to have supplementary entries and that is possibly typical of the way horses change and the way racing occurs with early-closing entries.”
Jean-Claude Rouget’s Mekhtaal, who finished only eighth from a difficult draw after starting second-favourite for last month’s Prix du Jockey Club [French Derby] is the narrow market leader for Thursday’s race while Fabre’s team for a race he has won 13 times already includes Cloth Of Stars, who finished eighth in the Derby at Epsom. Fabre also runs Maniaco, a lightly raced son of Galileo out of a Group One winning mare, who has had only two races to date but is clearly well-regarded by his trainer.
Fabre’s third runner is Talismanic, in the Godolphin colours, while Beacon Rock, second in the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot, looks to be Aidan O’Brien’s main contender with Ryan Moore in the saddle.
“It’s a very important race in the French calendar, we’re the only British runner and we’re really looking forward to it,” Dunlop said. “The ground there is officially soft at the moment but they are expecting it to dry back, and we’ve also run on soft ground before so it shouldn’t be an inconvenience. We’ve engaged a French jockey [Vincent Cheminaud] because we feel it will be important over there, so now it’s just fingers crossed that he runs well.”
