7 Jul 2008
Multiple Group 1 winner
Seachange makes her final race-day appearance on Thursday morning in England and then it's off to the serving barn this spring to be mated with Cambridge Stud champion sire
Zabeel.
Seachange lines up in the Group 1 Falmouth (1600m) which will be run at 2.10am Thursday morning and will be her final time to the races.
It will be a tough assignment for the New Zealand mare but Darjina and Finsceal Beo, her best- performed rivals, have had problems of their own.
Darjina is the class horse of the race but will have to overcome a testing trip to Newmarket, while Finsceal Beo ran last at her most recent start.
Darjina, who is trained in France, took about 18 hours to get from Chantilly to Newmarket. The mare was held up for 10 hours in Calais when rough seas delayed her ferry crossing across the Channel.
As a result, trainer Alain de Royer-Dupre will assess how the mare has come through the travel before confirming a start.
Darjina, the winner of three Group I races, is odds-on in early markets for the Falmouth.
The four-year-old has raced in Group I company in her last nine starts and has only once failed to return a dividend. She has run second in her three starts this year and beat Seachange when the runner-up in the Dubai Duty Free (1777m) in March.
Darjina has also beaten Finsceal Beo in each of their four clashes and ran second, beaten a head, with Finsceal Beo third, behind Haradasun in the Queen Anne Stakes (1600m) at Royal Ascot at her last start.
Since then Finsceal Beo has run last when stepping up to 2000m in the Pretty Polly Stakes in Ireland. She was eased down in the closing stages and trainer Jim Bolger reported that the mare appeared to have come out of the race in good shape.
The Falmouth market suggests that Infallible and Heaven Sent are other threats to Seachange.