Princess Zoe

On the 4th October 2020, all eyes were on Enable to bow her career out with a third victory in l’Arc de Triomphe.

However, the mare fell well below expectations and finished sixth, with Jean-Claude Rouget’s Sottsass taking the prize. But, Irish trainer, Tony Mullins believes it would have been his stable star Princess Zoe that would have spoilt the party.

He said, “I don’t care who thinks I’m crazy, I have no doubt in my mind that she’d have won the 2020 Arc. People think I’m crazy as she only stayed on over two-and-a-half miles but we rode her to stay on. I’m convinced she’d have won it. A month before the race, when the entries were coming out, I couldn’t see it as a sensible thing to do. However, she was improving so rapidly that I am now very disappointed we didn’t have a shot at it. We had a filly rated 64 at the end of June and then 14 weeks later we were saying we wish we went for the Arc.”

Princess Zoe is currently best priced at 66/1 for the 2021 Arc. But it remains to be seen whether she will go for this year’s race as Mullins would like to see her prove herself on a different going and over the shorter trip before setting that as the target.

“We were quite lucky last year, this mare benefits from a good cut in the ground and amazingly every time we ran her, except for her first win, the ground came up soft. I’m quite sure that she is a genuine Group One mare on soft ground but we need to see evidence that she is one on good ground before we can start talking about the next Arc. Also, she has to show form over 1m4f and 1m6f at a Group One level before we can say we’re going for it.”