Whirl was impressive on the clock in the Musidora

Watch And Learn: Graeme North timefigure analysis following Dante Festival

By Graeme North

Horse Racing

Tue May 20, 2025 · 4w ago

Graeme North tackles the big races from York and Longchamp last week from a timefigure perspective and feels one filly is "vastly overpriced" for the Oaks.

Beckett saved his best bullet for last

Yorkshire might not have trained a Derby winner since 1945, but the county still stages what is widely recognised as the premier domestic Derby trial, the Dante Stakes, which is named after the famous wartime winner who wasn’t able to race again as he became almost blind.

St Paddy (who was bred in Yorkshire ) was the first horse to complete the Dante – Derby double just three years after the Dante was inaugurated in 1958, since when the likes of Motivator, Authorized and Golden Horn have achieved the feat with Desert Crown in 2022 the most recent to do so.

The latest renewal looked all the more intriguing beforehand given Aidan O’Brien, who lest no one forget has won the Derby eight times since 2012 and who had mopped up virtually every known Derby trial ahead of the Dante, had chosen the race as the comeback for ante-post Derby favourite The Lion In Winter, who had held that position ever since beating Guineas fifth Wimbledon Hawkeye and Guineas winner Ruling Court handsomely in last year’s Acomb.

Oddly enough, for all his success at Epsom, one of the most puzzling statistics of the last decade or so is O’Brien’s poor record in the Dante - he hasn’t won it since 2010 and only seven of the eighteen horses he has sent to York since 2011 have finished in the first three. Exactly what his defeat then means for his Epsom prospects is hard to pin down exactly.

After all, he remains one of only two horses to have beaten the 2000 Guineas winner, the 115 timefigure he recorded in the Acomb is still right up there with the best of those posted by his generation and unexpected comeback defeats in the last two seasons for Auguste Rodin and City of Troy, neither of whom ran anywhere near as well as The Lion In Winter, didn’t prevent them going on to win the Derby.

O’Brien’s comments afterwards that he suspected there would likely be a huge improvement in The Lion In Winter at Epsom might well be significant too, but against that it’s also a fact that he had another two weeks to get both Auguste Rodin and City of Troy ready in tip-top shape for Epsom than he will have with The Lion In Winter.

So, what about the horse who did win the Dante, Pride of Arras? Perhaps significantly, he was a most unusual winner, as Desert Crown had been before him, in that he was winning the Dante on just his second racecourse start.

Pride Of Arras comes nicely clear under Rossa Ryan

One of the features of the 2025 season of Classic Trials has been just how often Ralph Beckett has been double handed, unsurprisingly given how many of his 2025 bunch of three-year-olds won first time out in the second half of their two-year-old season, but he looks to have saved his best bullet for last.

A 103 timefigure is insignificant in the wider history of recent Dante winners but the winning time was never going to be fast once the first two furlongs or so had been contested slowly and with that early scenario in mind, besides the significant amount of time he was short of racing room before quickening clear, it’s to his credit that he pulled over a length ahead of the runner-up Damysus and three lengths clear of third-placed Wimbledon Hawkeye.

Using the detailed sectional finishing times available from RaceIQ, the new sectional upgrade formula currently being trialled at Timeform strictly gives Pride of Arras a 9lb upgrade and Damysus a 11lb upgrade, with those upgrades being significantly higher than either Wimbledon Hawkeye or fourth-placed Devil’s Advocate achieved, but that’s without factoring the trouble in running he encountered into the equation and had he got out sooner he would surely have won by getting on for three lengths.

He’s currently widely available at 5/1 for the Derby, the same price as The Lion In Winter and behind Delacroix and Ruling Court. Damysus is available at 12s if you fancy he’ll handle the downhill straight at Epsom – I don’t, as I said about him last time, and he once again showed a tendency to edge left again here – and I’m still a bit surprised to see my each-way fancy Lambourn as big as 18/1.

Nightwalker, who is bred on very similar lines to the St Leger winner Logician, and Mister Rizz, who blew the start and never got involved yet wasn’t beaten far on just his third start having learnt very little on his second when a very easy winner of a three-runner race, are two others from the race to keep an eye on going forward. Mister Rizz, who is out of the Ribblesdale winner Frankly Darling, is potentially one of the best of the lot if three races in the space of six weeks haven’t set him back.

Stats say Whirl should be Epsom-bound

If we saw the Derby winner winning the Dante we might also have seen the Oaks winner Whirl winning the Musidora, like the Dante a race named after a Classic winner trained in Yorkshire, in her case the 1000 Guineas and the Oaks.

Certainly, Whirl looks vastly overpriced in the Oaks market, to me at least, if you knew she was certain to go there but it seems she might end up in France instead which would be Epsom’s loss. To put her win into context, a five-and-a-half length winning distance is the same as subsequent Oaks winner Emily Upjohn achieved in 2022 and subsequent Oaks third Punctilious managed in 2004; not only that, her 112 timefigure is the second highest winning figure in the race this century bettered only by The Fugue who posted a 115 in 2012 before going on to finish a very unfortunate third in the Oaks after a nightmare run that left her poorly placed and with far too much to do under a ride William Buick won’t want reminding about.

Whirl’s timefigure could arguably have been a bit higher, 114 by my calculations had I wanted to be a bit bolder, but as with pretty much every strongly-run winning performance it didn’t come with an upgrade of any significance with 1lb arguably as much extra as she deserved.

Ridden as though her stamina wasn’t in question, Whirl ran each of the last three furlongs faster than her rivals, going and further clear, and will surely relish a mile and a half. Twenty-nine fillies, or approximately one a year, have run in the Oaks this century with a Timeform pre-race Master Rating of 114 or more; eight of them won, another four finished second and another three finished third. Those statistics suggest she ought to be thereabouts should she get the green light and as things stand she’s achieved a fair bit more on the racecourse than either of her stablemates Giselle and Minnie Hauk.

Could Fire creep towards Arc tilt?

High as it was, Whirl’s 112 timefigure wasn’t the highest winning one at York, or even the second highest – those figures (117 and 113 respectively) were earned by See The Fire in the Middleton Stakes and Inisherin in the 1895 Duke Of York Clipper Stakes.

See The Fire had the best form in the Middleton and started odds on but even so won in remarkable fashion with her twelve-length winning margin unsurprisingly being the biggest winning margin in the race this century on top of which her timefigure also topping the 115 achieved by Promising Lead in 2008 and Sariska in 2010. Those two fillies had contrasting remaining careers, with Promising Lead going on to win a Group 1 while Sariska spoiled her legacy by refusing to race in her last two races, but this run suggests See The Fire is ready to go one better than in the 2024 Nassau should she head there, albeit French filly Sparkling Plenty really ought to have won that race.

Bred as she is, though, being by Sea The Stars out of a Juddmonte International winner, if she were mine a crack at a mile and a half would be on the agenda and last year’s Middleton winner Bluestocking, of course, ended up winning the Arc.

See The Fire, ridden by Oisin Murphy

Back from a wind operation and an off-the-rails end to his three-year-old campaign after winning the Commonwealth Cup at Royal Ascot en route, Inisherin ran out a game winner of the Duke of York in a race in which the first four finished in stalls order.

The race was run at a good clip thanks to the free-running Night Raider whose last furlong was markedly the slowest among the first four home having done too much too soon but I was most taken by the runner-up Flora Of Bermuda who was the last off the bridle after absolutely tanking along despite being short of racing room and who the data revealed ran each of the last three furlongs fastest of all, even getting to the front briefly inside the final furlong.

Her sectional times have long shown she possesses the ability to land a big race when putting it all together, and having ended her three-year-old campaign with a clear career-best at Ascot it would be no surprise to see her turn the tables on the winner in the Jubilee back there at the Royal meeting.

Pissarro one to be positive about

Oddly for York, none of the two-year-old races returned good figures, though sectional upgrades calculated closer to home than the usual three-furlong point for the novice on the opening day suggest that the runner-up Utmost Respect, who shares his name with an Ayr Gold Cup winner that was also trained in the same stable, arguably give him a 9lb better upgrade than the winner Ballistic Missile, and as those figures suggest he’d have won comfortably had things fallen his way. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see him lining up at Ascot as one of the leading contenders for a juvenile race.

Aidan O’Brien might have been out of luck in the first wo Classics, but he was on the mark in the French version of the 2000 Guineas, the Poule d’Essai des Poulains, with Henri Matisse who had a head to spare over runner-up Jonquil with another of O’Brien’s raiding party, Camille Pissarro, a length back in third.

The race might have been unusually strongly run and the track record might have been broken but even so the winner’s finishing speed was a healthy 102.7%, suggesting he’s worth upgrading over the more closely ridden-up Jonquil to the tune of 2lb or 3lb but earning the biggest upgrade of all was Camille Pissarro who finished fastest from a poor draw almost in the car park.

As I wrote I my preview of the race, the very small number of horses that have managed to hit the frame from such wide draws as he had in near-maximum fields have in recent years included subsequent French Derby winner New Bay and Intello, and he’d merit plenty of respect if going down that route too.

It was a shame the leading French colt Maranoa Charlie wasn’t allowed to take his chance in the Poulains, connections left with substantial egg on their face after an attempt to make him into a sprinter backfired spectacularly in a Group 3 race at Chantilly this week.

The French 1000, the Pouliches, was won by Zarigana after Shes Perfect, who had finished behind her in the Prix de la Grotte last time, was demoted for minimal interference. The winning time was marginally slower than the Poulains but Zarigana still managed to run the joint-fastest last 200m in either Classic along with Detain in the Poulains, as well as the outright fastest of all penultimate 200m, which put together suggest that, as in the Grotte, the result doesn’t tell the true story with Zarigana being the better filly in the region of 3lb or 4lb.