The English page:The Italian-trained Kaspersky won the Group Two Meilen-Trophy at Düsseldorf

Racing historians were left scratching their heads after the Italian-trained Kaspersky (Footstepsinthesand) won the Group Two Meilen-Trophy at Düsseldorf last Sunday. Not because he had won – as he was certainly entitled to do, having won eight of his previous ten starts and starting a solid second favourite – but because it was the first Italian winner in Germany for many a long year. Although there may have been Italian winners of minor events, it appears there has never been before this last victory a win in a German group race, although there have been dozens of classic and Group One German winners in Italy.

As far as has been discovered, the last big Italian winner here was Stratford in the 1969 Grosser Preis von Baden – two years before the European Pattern race was established and three years before German races were admitted to the pattern. Kaspersky had of course every right to win at Düsseldorf; he is probably the best Italian miler, and although – with all due respect – German form is normally much stronger than Italian form, that mainly applies to races run over a longer distance. Harald Siemen, Germany´s top handicapper, has posted an interesting blog on the German Racing website this week. He has calculated that since 1986, when Germans were first included in the International Classifications or World Rankings, 136 German-trained thoroughbreds have been rated 115+, i.e. of proper Group One ability. Almost all of these ran at ten furlongs or more, only 20 of them were sprinters or milers.

This is hardly surprising when one considers that all seven German Group One races are run over ten furlongs or more, and five of them over a mile and a half. This is the distance at which German-breds traditionally excel, and in recent years we have seen German winners of the Arc and King George. German-breds also do well at even longer distances – the Melbourne Cup, Gold Cup, Cadran, for example – and have been mightily successful  in National Hunt racing as well, with Annie Power and Don Cossack two outstanding examples from last season.

However over a mile or less, it is a different matter. Both German Guineas races this season were won by Newmarket-trained three-year-olds, and this latest race – with unfortunately no three-year-old in the small field -  was another example. As expected, front-runner Wildpark (Shamardal) set a good pace, but Kaspersky, with Umberto Rispoli in the saddle, never let him establish a good lead, and soon after they came into the straight Kaspersky went on. The favourite Pas de Deux (Saddex), certainly one of the top German milers at present, went in pursuit and looked dangerous for a moment, but Rispoli had kept a bit up his sleeve on Kaspersky and the Italian five-year-old kept finding more. Drummer (Duke of Marmalade) finished best of all and almost got up for second, just failing by a head; that was his best ever form. The time of one minute, 34.98 seconds was extremely fast, and later in the afternoon Fährhof´s three-year-old filly Sarandia (Dansili) set a new course record for eleven furlongs when winning a conditions race in two minutes 13.09 seconds; she is now on course for the Preis der Diana (Oaks) over this course and distance on August 7^th, a race which currently looks like attracting a maximum field.

These times make it clear that the going at Düsseldorf was very fast, a far cry from Hamburg a week earlier where the winning time of the Derby winner was the third slowest since the war. Obviously Kaspersky relished these conditions and he is now expected to run next in the Topkapi Trophy at Istanbul´s big international meeting (the political situation permitting), where the ground is also almost always on top.

There are no group races this weekend in Germany. The very popular Bad Harzburg meeting begins, but handicaps are the order of the day at the pretty course in the Harz mountains resort area. The only black type race is the listed Hoppegartener Sprint –Cup over five furlongs at the Berlin track. There is an international field here, with two Czech runners and one each from Norway, Sweden and France facing five locals. Favourite is Daring Match (Call me Big), one of Germany´s better sprinters, but six furlongs would probably suit him better and he has to concede weight all round, so another foreign success is certainly a possibility.

David Conolly-Smith