Drags Chase History: The Summer Finale

June, Auteuil

Drags Chase

Group 2, 5-year-olds and above, 4,400m/2m6f Chase, €247,000

Created in 1883

Last winner: Jojo Lapin (g5, FRA by Cokoriko ex Voix du Sang, by Westerner), owned by Haras de Saint-Voir, bred by Haras de Saint-Voir, trained by David Cottin, ridden by Gabin Meunier.

The Drags Chase will be run in 2025 for the 138th time.

The 2024 Edition

Saturday 8 June 2024, Auteuil Racecourse (Paris). – The final act of a season that peaked with the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris (Gr1), held twenty days earlier, the €247,000 Prix des Drags Chase (Gr2) proved particularly selective as only four of the seven horses taking part completed the 2m6f course.

The clash between the five-year-old Jojo Lapin (Cokoriko) and the mare Milanne (Turgeon), who had been unbeaten in her two chases this season, delivered a spectacular performance. The Haras de Saint-Voir-bred, who had fallen at the fourth jumps in the Grand Steeple at odds of 45/1, was more prominent this time. He effortlessly closed in during the final turn after Toscana du Berlais (Shantou), Hipster Paradise (American Devil), and finally Spes Militurf (König Turf) had successively fallen while leading the race. David Cottin’s trainee, ridden again by Gabin Meunier after having had three different riders this season, jumped the last hurdle behind the McMillan stable’s mare and alongside Hasard de Brion (Axxos), the winner of the Prix du Président de la République Handicap Chase (French National, Gr3) who had rejoined the race after being held back in the turn. The run-in struggle remained uncertain for a long time, but the youngest horse in the field finally prevailed, crossing the finish line a short neck ahead of Milanne, with Hasard de Brion more than six lengths behind.

Jojo Lapin won the Emilius and Alcide Hurdle races, his first two, early last year at Auteuil. He switched to chasing the following fall, finishing 6th in the Maurice Gillois 4yo Chase (Gr1) after two placings over fences, always at Auteuil.

Before his Grand Steeple mishap, he had finished 2nd at Compiègne for his seasonal debut over hurdles. Then, returning to the Auteuil Chase in the William & Alec Head Chase (Gr3), he achieved the same position, just a head behind Imbatable du Seuil, who has been absent since that race, run on April 16th.

Jojo Lapin’s dam, Voix du Sang (Westerner), was also bred by Nicolas de Lageneste’s Haras de Saint-Voir. Still, her dam Line Saj (Dhaudevi), dam of champions Line Marine (Agent Bleu) and Steel Jack (Gold and Steel), was bred by the Vuillard family. This lineage traces back to Blue Tip (Tip Moss), a winner of the Prix Pénélope (Gr3) and 6th in the Prix de Diane (Gr1) for the Wildenstein stable. Blue Tip is the dam of listed winners at Auteuil, and the second dam is Grandera, a triple Gr1 winner, and George Washington, a six-time Gr1 winner at 2 and 3 years old.

N'En Déplaise (Ivanhowe) is a brother to Jojo Lapin, born in 2023 at Saint-Voir.

History

The Drags Chase was first held on Friday, 1 June 1883, at Auteuil. A steeplechase handicap run over 2 miles and 7 furlongs, the honours in this inaugural edition went to the English favourite Lord Chancellor. Carrying the top weight of 75.5 kilos, he had already shown his quality across the Channel by clinching the Grand Sefton Chase at Aintree and the Grand Military Gold Cup at Sandown. He had not taken part in the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris five days earlier, unlike the English mare Eau de Vie who, after taking second place on Sunday, had to content herself with third place the following Friday. 11,550 F better off for the victory of his horse in "Les Drags", Mr Henderson decided to keep him in Paris for four more days to collect 12 750 F more on Monday, 4 June. And it could scarcely have been easier money, as Lord Chancellor ran alone in the Prix des Cascades (3 miles 1 furlong) after the expected opponents withdrew late on in the face of the British competitor’s clear superiority.

A similar scenario presented itself the following year. Still, this time, luck was on the side of Eau de Vie (aged 9), owned by the Duke of Hamilton, trained in England by Richard Marsh and ridden by his brother-in-law, the amateur rider Dennis Thirlwell. His first success came on the Friday in the Drags Chase at the expense of Baudres, Baron Finot’s champion from the Wednesday’s Grande Course de Haies d'Auteuil. But the second success on Monday, 9 June, in the Prix des Cascades, was far removed from the previous year’s canter in the park, as carrying 78 kilos, he only beat his 4-year-old compatriot Donny Carney (63 kilos) by a head. The latter had also been busy, finishing fourth in the Grand Steeple on Sunday, 1 June and first in the Prix du Défilé (2 miles 2 furlongs) on Friday, 6 June.

After these two initial triumphs for British horses, the challenge of the cross-Channel raiders quickly faded. Indeed, ahead of the 127th edition in 2014 (the race was not held from 1915 to 1918 or in 1940), the Drags Chase honours list includes the names of just three more English competitors: Jerry M (1909), Easter Hero (1928) and Herring Gull (1970, trained by John Ciechanowski, a well-known figure in France). All three had taken part in the Grand Steeple five days earlier, the first two having suffered falls. Jerry M, meanwhile, lost out to Saint Caradec but exacted his revenge the following year by outclassing his French rivals.

From 1883 to 1894, the Drags Chase was run in handicap form with a sole condition: "all winners after the publication of the weights will carry 3 additional kilos ".From 1895, it became a conditions race (with different overweights) for horses having taken part in the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris or the Grande Course de Haies d'Auteuil, with the winners of these two biggest races of the year excluded. Basically, the Drags Chase was aimed at those who had missed out on the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris run five days earlier. And so it remained until 1947 when the ban on the participation of the Grand Steeple winner was lifted. After 1970, the winner of the Grand Steeple was not excluded in name but by the conditions, which ruled that the horses must not have won prize money of 80,000 F, which increased to 200,000 F in 1973. Finally, dating from 1988, the Drags Chase was run on the same day as the Grand Steeple, a situation that continued until 1997, during which period the quality of the participants dipped. In 1998, when the Grand Steeple was brought forward to the last Sunday in May, the Drags Chase remained associated with the third week in June, forming, together with the Grande Course de Haies and the Prix Alain du Breil, Auteuil’s second-most important meeting of the first half of the year. The prize money on offer for the winner having been vastly increased, the Drags Chase has found a new lease of life and now attracts the top steeplechasers, including the unlucky losers from the Grand Steeple, who now benefit from a three-week recovery period.

Its original distance of 2 miles 5 furlongs, shorter than the Grand Steeple's, has often varied but never exceeded the 2 miles 6 ½ furlongs favoured from 1908 to 1961. Reduced to 2 miles 5 ½ furlongs from 1962 to 1967, the distance was subsequently modified to 2 miles 5 furlongs (1968 to 1970), 2 miles 6 furlongs (1971 to 1987), 2 miles 4 ½ furlongs (1988 and 1989) and again 2 miles 5 ½ furlongs (1990 to 1997), before settling at 2 miles 6 furlongs since 1998.

Les Drags

The Larousse dictionary defines the drag as a sort of carriage (like a mail coach) “in which ladies would follow a drag, namely a race simulating a mounted hunt in which the role of the prey is taken by a rider whose horse drags behind it a fox skin, thereby leaving a scent to be followed by the dogs".

At the wish of the Prince de Sagan, chairman of the Société des Steeple-Chases de France, Drags Day at Auteuil was a veritable festival of elegance. After the Grand Steeple run on the Sunday and the Grande Course de Haies on the Wednesday, four evocatively named races were planned for the Friday from 1893: the Prix du Rendez-vous, Prix du Défilé, Drags Chase and Prix de la Vénerie. On the day, four-in-hand carriages gathered in the Place de la Concorde in front of the Hôtel de Coislin (home to the headquarters of the Société des Steeple-Chases de France), before transporting dozens of guests on the 75-minute journey, driven not by coachmen but by their distinguished owners. After heading up the Champs Elysées and then down the Avenue du Bois (now the Avenue Foch), they twisted their way alongside the lakes of the Bois de Boulogne to reach Auteuil around 2 pm. There, they formed a procession to the beat of a triumphant military march. After alighting, the elegant passengers would cross the track via the unfurled carpet to the weighing area where their hosts, the committee members, would welcome them. Shunning the racing, they would stroll behind the scenes, under the great trees in the paddock, making several stops at the Roman Pavilion, where afternoon tea would be served. "For meetings of this type, the races are nothing but a pretext: one goes there not to see, but to be seen: it amounts to a fashion contest which overshadows everything else and captures all the attention; indeed, the Committee stand is transformed into a venue for the special award for the most elegant ladies from Parisian high society".

On 13 June 1890 at Auteuil, nineteen mail coaches participated in this exclusive ritual. The following year it was twenty-six, followed by twelve in 1904 and ten in 1911. Cancelled during the two world wars, this festival of elegance would, however, have a long life courtesy of the later involvement of the fashion houses, delighted to have a showcase for the trends of the day. The tradition thus continued until 1967, until the events of 1968 ended such displays of unbridled elegance at Auteuil.

N.B. The Text is taken from Guy Thibault's book Auteuil hier and Aujourd'hui (volume 1, 1830-1915) (Editions du Castelet, Menton).

Multiple winners

Eight horses have won the Prix de Drags more than once: two have won it three times: Journaliste (1908, 1910, 1911) and Quo Vadis (1954, 1955, 1958); and six have won it twice: Gisors (1886, 1887), Violon II (1904, 1906), Héros XII (1920, 1923), Dryas (1946, 1947), Florinaco (1963, 1965) and El Paso III (2001, 2002).

The Drags Chase and the Grand Steeple

The double has been done 15 times: 4 times in the Grand Steeple-Drags order, by Valois (1896-1897), Kargal (1943, 1945), Bel La Vie (2013-2015), Storm of Saintly (2014-2016); 10 times in the Drags-Grand Steeple order, by Solitaire (1896-1897), Jerry M (1909-1910), L'Yser (1921-1923), Symbole (1941-1942), Bouzoulou (1948-1949), Bonosnap (1956-1957), Cacao (1966-1967), Ubu III (1991-1995), Arenice (1995-1996) and Polar Rochelais (2009-2010). One horse, Héros XII, has sandwiched a Grand Steeple victory (1922) between two successes in the Drags Chase (1920, 1923). Lastly, although the winner of the Grand Steeple was not qualified to run in the same year’s Drags Chase, the double was done in 2002 by El Paso III, who was not awarded first place in the Grand Steeple-Chase until the autumn, when the disqualification of Double Car was announced after a long enquiry into the presence of controlled substances.

Owners

• Jules Finot (3 wins): North Pole (1885), Ardent II (1898), Quitte ou Double (1900).
• Eugène Fischhof (3 wins): Journaliste (1908, 1910, 1911).
• Max de Rivaud (3 wins): Strelitz (1930), Heugon (1931), Mérigo (1944).
• Alberto Duggan (3 wins): L’Arbre Broyé (1939), Dryas (1946, 1947).
• Pierre Delafosse (3 wins): Quo Vadis (1954, 1955, 1958).
• Daniel Wildenstein (3 wins): Ardfern (1961), Dear Patrick (1984), Indien Bleu (2000).

Trainers

• Jean-Paul Gallorini (6 wins): Ardfern (1961), Si Jamais (1989), King Mister (1993), Cour d’Honneur (1994), Indien Bleu (2000), Princesse Kap (2014)
• Alphonse Baresse (4 wins): De La Tour (1890), Senlis (1891), Violon II (1904, 1906). 
• Maurice d’Okhuysen (4 wins): Strelitz (1930), Heugon (1931), Jalgreya (1943), Kargal (1945). 
• René Pelat (4 wins): Quo Vadis (1954, 1955, 1958), Vidilino (1971). 
• François Doumen (4 wins): Nupsala (1987), Ubu III (1991), Corton (1997), Rubissimo (1999). 

Riders

• Paul Péraldi (4 wins): Rameau (1951), Quo Vadis (1954, 1955), Bonosnap (1956).
• Christophe Pieux (4 wins): Chamberko (1998), El Paso III (2002), Hercule Noir (2005), Louping d’Ainay (2008).
• George Mitchell (3 wins): Héros XII (1920, 1923), Virulent (1924). 
• Robert Bates (3 wins): Mérigo (1943), Dryas (1946, 1947). 
• Denis Leblond (3 wins): Ardfern (1981), Dear Patrick (1984), Gamelion (1986). 

• Philippe Chevalier (3 wins): King Mister (1993), Cabernet (1996), Corton (1997).