Facteur Cheval to swerve Sussex Stakes at Goodwood

There will be no visit to the Qatar Goodwood Festival for Facteur Cheval this year, with immediate plans on hold as he recovers from his Royal Ascot exertions.

Jerome Reynier’s six-year-old has contested the Sussex Stakes at Goodwood for the past two years, taking the runner-up spot behind Paddington in 2023 before finishing third to Notable Speech 12 months ago.

Facteur Cheval’s name is among the entries for this year’s race once again, but a third visit to the Sussex Downs has been ruled out by connections, who are prepared to bide their time after learning little from their Prince of Wales’s Stakes experiment up in distance at the Royal meeting.

Barry Irwin, CEO of Team Valor International, who own the horse in partnership with Gary Barber, said: “We had planned to run him in Germany, but the race and trip at Ascot took too much out of him and we’re going to have wait a while and figure out what we do next with him.

“I don’t think he will be coming back in the next month or so, and I think it could take a couple of months to find the right race.

“Also where he is trained near Marseille, they have had a real heatwave there so it’s been really hard for Jerome to train those horses and we’ve got three horses there who are kind of in limbo right now.”

Irwin added: “We’ll have to just wait for something in the fall, we haven’t given up the idea of running 10 furlongs but that last race just didn’t work out well for him at all, we didn’t learn much.

“We’ll take it race by race and then head back to the Middle East again over the winter as he does enjoy it there.”