5 January 2017
Crédit photo scoopdyga.com
For the fifth time in the last eight years, Pau-based trainer Jean-Claude Rouget leads the French tables...
Trainer Jean-Claude Rouget finished 2016 largely leading the French tables over the flat with 173 wins for 674 runners and a total tally of €10.2m, including owners' Premiums. It is the first time that his stable passes this symbolic bar of €10m, and this is without adding of course the €1.7m won by its European champion 3yo Almanzor at the end of the season in the Irish Champion Stakes and in the Champion Stakes at Ascot on Qipco Champions' Day.
In 2016, Jean-Claude Rouget also trained the country's best filly, La Cressonnière. The good news is that Almanzor, like her, remains in training for a new season at 4.
In 1994, he set a new French record in number of wins with an impressive 242 victories, including Millkom's Grand Prix of Paris (Gr1). Since then, Jean-Claude Rouget ranks every year in the French Top4 in prizemoney and premiums. He led that table five times in the last eight years, since the annus mirabilis of Le Havre, Stacelita, Tamazirte or Elusive Wave, in 2009, also the year he first took over his rivals at the head of the training rankings, the first in France to do so despite being based in the Provinces.