12 January 2017
credit photo : scoopdyga.com
We continue our review of the 2016 season leaders with Guillaume Macaire, to jumps trainers for the 13th time...
Based on the Les Mathes racecourse near Royan in Charente-Maritime, Guillaume Macaire ended the 2016 season at the top of the France Galop jump trainers tables with 248 wins and about €8.3m in prizemoney. It is his eighth consecutive title, the thirteenth in total since his first in 2002.
In 2015, he had set a new French record with 282 wins, but the yard's earnings in 2016 far exceeded the previous year's score, when it neared the €7m mark for the first time. It should also be noted that when Macaire became leading trainer for the first time, in 2002, his horses' earnings reached "only" €3.2m...
Yet Macaire does not run many more horses than before, since he entered 100 fewer runners last year than in 2014, when he saddled nearly a thousand. The yard also won more races in 2013, 2014 and 2015 than in 2016. The difference in 2016 is that his horses took twenty Group races, including the Grand Steeple-chase de Paris Gr1) with So French (Poliglote), a fourth French Gold Cup for Macaire, the third in four years with three different horses: Bel La Vie (Lavirco), Storm of Saintly (Saint des Saints, also 2nd in 2016) and So French, all of them still amongst France's top chasers last Autumn.
On virtually every front, Guillaume Macaire is now running after his own records...