Calandagan caps a huge season for owner and trainer

To think that Calandagan began the season in danger of being labelled a ‘nearly horse’! His career-best effort in the Champion Stakes at Ascot last weekend, where he comfortably beat the colts who had dominated the top mile and a quarter races earlier in the year, Ombudsman and Delacroix, was one worthy of the race’s title and gained in thoroughly professional fashion. It made him Timeform’s highest-rated horse in Europe and ended for good any lingering doubts about his attitude.

Twelve months earlier, Calandagan had been the beaten favourite when runner-up to 40/1-shot Anmaat in a messy edition of the Champion Stakes which had been run on Ascot’s inner hurdles track because of the testing conditions. That defeat, in which he met trouble in running, followed his second place to Timeform’s 2024 Horse of The Year City of Troy in the Juddmonte International where he was the only one from the rear third of the field to make any impression on the winner who made all.

But two more second places in the Dubai Sheema Classic and Coronation Cup on his first two starts this year extended Calandagan’s sequence of runner-up finishes to four. Once again, he wasn’t seen to best effect in Dubai, but what about his half-length defeat to Jan Brueghel at Epsom where excuses were harder to find? Was he outstayed by the previous season’s St Leger winner, or outbattled?

Either way, Calandagan didn’t look back from that defeat. He made his Group 1 breakthrough with an authoritative win in the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud before a rematch with Jan Brueghel in the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes over the same course and distance as his six-length win in the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot the year before. The King George panned out far more favourably for Calandagan after Jan Brueghel set out to make all, and after being held up last of the five runners, he quickened past Kalpana, herself a winner at Ascot last weekend, for a length win with Jan Brueghel (not seen since) only fourth.

The Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe would be the natural autumn target for a King George winner, especially one trained in France, though with no sign of the French authorities lifting the ban on geldings taking part, Longchamp’s loss was very much Ascot’s gain when Calandagan was aimed at the Champion Stakes. In completing the King George-Champion Stakes double in the same year, he achieved something which had last been accomplished by one of the greats, Brigadier Gerard, in 1972.

Brigadier Gerard, whose trainer Major Dick Hern was inducted into British Flat Racing’s Hall of Fame last weekend – four years after Brigadier Gerard himself – also completed his King George-Champion Stakes double as a four-year-old, having already won the Champion Stakes – then run at Newmarket of course – at three. In between, he also won the Eclipse but also suffered the only defeat of his 18-race career when beaten by Derby winner Roberto in the Benson & Hedges Gold Cup at York.

The only horse between Brigadier Gerard and Calandagan to have won both the King George and Champion Stakes was the top-class filly Time Charter. The 1982 Oaks winner won the Champion Stakes later that year by seven lengths with that season’s King George winner Kalaglow, who started favourite, only eighth. The following season, she landed the King George when ridden by Joe Mercer, Brigadier Gerard’s jockey.

The only previous King George winners to have attempted to win the same season’s Champion Stakes since Champions Day moved to Ascot in 2011 were the three-year-olds Nathaniel and Adayar. Both finished fifth in the Champion Stakes, Nathaniel in 2011 and Adayar ten years later.

It was another French-trained gelding, Cirrus des Aigles, who won that first Champions Stakes to be run at Ascot. His trainer, Corine Barande-Barbe, took the opportunity after the race to express her gratitude that Cirrus des Aigles had been able to contest the Champion Stakes as a gelding, implying criticism of the fact that he was barred from the Arc.

Calandagan’s connections, on the other hand, were in the happy position of winning both the major middle-distance contests of the autumn, with three-year-old Daryz having won the Arc a fortnight earlier. Breeding top-class middle-distance horses is very much the focus of the Aga Khan Studs but sadly the Aga Khan himself didn’t quite live long enough to enjoy an outstanding season in which his horses won the King George, Arc and Champion Stakes. Those victories came with Mickael Barzalona in the saddle who was appointed first jockey for the Aga Khan Studs’ French-trained horses from the start of 2025.

Calandagan was a fifth winner of the King George for the Aga Khan Studs. The late Aga Khan won the Champion Stakes twice when it was run at Newmarket, with Vayrann and Kalanisi, while his father Prince Aly Khan also won it twice and his grandfather a record six times.

But Calandagan also contributed to an even more successful year for his trainer Francis-Henri Graffard who became the Aga Khan’s main trainer in France following the retirement of Alain de Royer Dupre at the end of 2021. Graffard’s French earnings alone this year have recently broken the €10m barrier which is around twice that of multiple champion trainer Andre Fabre. Graffard is no stranger to success on Champions Day, having won the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes in 2020 with The Revenant.

The Champion Stakes took Graffard’s total of Group 1 wins this year to twelve. Besides Calandagan and Daryz, Zarigana (awarded the Poule d’Essai des Pouliches), Candelari (Prix Vicomtesse Vigier) and Sibayan (Preis von Europa) were all further top-level winners for the Aga Khan Studs.

Graffard’s other Group 1 wins were provided by Gezora, a second classic winner of the year in the Prix de Diane, along with Woodshauna (Prix Jean Prat), Quisisana (Prix Jean Romanet), Sahlan (Prix du Moulin) and 2024 King George winner Goliath who won the Grosser Preis von Baden.

But while Calandagan’s European campaign may have finished, he’s likely to end the year with a run in next month’s Japan Cup. All three races that he has won this year qualify him for the US$3m bonus on offer to a winning horse from overseas. It’s now twenty years since the Japan Cup last went abroad when the Luca Cumani-trained Alkaased was successful under Frankie Dettori, but Calandagan might just be the one to emulate the 1997 Champion Stakes winner Pilsudski who went on to win the Japan Cup that year for Sir Michael Stoute.

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