Christoph Berglar’s four-year-old Novellist, Europe’s top older horse,
won Sunday’s Group 1 Grosser Preis von Baden at Baden-Baden in Germany and
became the first horse to win three Breeders’ Cup Challenge races in a single
year.
The Breeders’ Cup Challenge is a global series of 67 stakes races whose
winners receive automatic starting berths into a corresponding race of the
Breeders’ Cup World Championships, which will be held on November 1-2 at Santa
Anita Park in Arcadia, California.
Novellist, trained by Andreas Wohler and ridden to victory by Eddie Perdroza,
previously won the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud in France in June, which gave the
bay son of Monsun an automatic berth into the $3 million Breeders’ Cup Turf.
Last month, Novellist dominated his second Challenge series race taking the King
George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot by five lengths.
Sent away as the odds on-favorite against just four rivals in the 1 1/2-mile
Grosser Preis, Novellist took the lead with a furlong remaining and held
off three-time Group 1 winner Meandre and stablemate Seismos in the final 100
yards to win by three-quarters of a length.
“He wasn’t as spectacular as at Ascot, but he on won in the way we were
expecting as he was only 80 to 90 percent right today,” Wohler told Racing
Post, who added that Novellist would be pointed to the Prix de l’Arc de
Triomphe at Longchamp on October 6 for this next start, and regular rider Johnny
Murtagh would return for the mount.
Novellist has now won nine of his 11 career starts and his fifth in a row, a
streak which began with a win in the Gran Premio del Jockey Club Italiano last
October and continued this year with a victory in the Grosser Preis der
Badischen Unternehmer at Baden-Baden on May 12, prior to the Grand Prix de
Saint-Cloud triumph.
Novellist is one of six horses who have already qualified for the Turf this
year. He joins Ordak Dan, who won the Gran Premio 25 de Mayo in Argentina; Gold
Ship, winner of the Takazuka Kinen in Japan; Big Blue Kitten, who won the United
Nations Stakes at Monmouth Park in July; Real Solution, winner of the Arlington
Million; and Vagabond Shoes, who captured the Del Mar Handicap one week ago.
As a part of the enhancements of the Breeders’ Cup Challenge series,
Breeders’ Cup Ltd., will pay the US$60,000 entry fee for Novellist to start in
the Turf if he is nominated to the Breeders’ Cup program by October 21. All
horses entered from outside of the United States and Canada entered in this
year’s Breeders’ Cup will also receive a US$40,000 travel allowance.
In other Breeders’ Cup Challenge results Sunday, the two-year-old filly
Rizeena qualified for the $1 million Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf, after
bursting through in the stretch to win the Group 1 Moyglare Stud Stakes at the
Curragh in Ireland for trainer Clive Brittain.
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