IT ended up a match race evocative of the 18th century but last Friday morning expectation for an interesting renewal of the Criterium International at ParisLongchamp some 48 hours later was strong, even though only five horses remained eligible.

Then Freddy Head decided not to declare Devil, a Group 3 winner and Group 2 runner-up, and the race was living up to its name, all four candidates hailing from outside France and three of them under of the care of members of the first family of Irish racing, the O’Briens.

Next, on Sunday morning, O’Brien senior – Aidan – decided against subjecting Wichita to a gruelling test on very heavy ground and we were down to three. That trio all went to post but one of them, Joseph O’Brien’s supplementary entry, Lady Penelope, flipped over in the starting stalls and had to be withdrawn, though thankfully her antics did not injure herself or her partner, Shane Crosse.

At this point there was the very real possibility that the €250,000 seven-furlong showpiece would end up as a walkover – fears that Aidan’s second contender, Armory, had himself been hurt via his proximity to Lady Penelope in the adjacent stall, were only allayed once the son of Galileo was extricated from the starting gate and trotted up sound.

The race did eventually go ahead, though it turned into something of a walkover anyway as Armory’s solitary opponent, the German-trained Alson, handled the conditions much better than his adversary and crossed the winning line a whopping 20 lengths clear.

Trained near Cologne by Jean-Pierre Carvalho and the 19th top-level victory of an annus mirabilis for jockey Frankie Dettori, the Areion colt was restrained behind Armory for the first half-furlong.

Dettori then acceded to his mount’s obvious wish to go faster, and the winning time suggested that this apparent non-event may in fact have witnessed a high-class performance – 1m 28.61s was a second and a half quicker than Johannes Vermeer clocked in less testing conditions during a strongly-run renewal four years earlier.

Having eschewed his regular flying dismount in front of a sparse crowd on account of the slippery unsaddling enclosure, Dettori joked that he had ‘pinched the race from the front’, before admitting that race was already in the bag before its halfway mark.

“It ended up like a piece of work for him and I would imagine that his owner [Baron Georg von Ullmann] will be keen on coming back here for the Poule d’Essai des Poulains,” Dettori said. The margin between the two colts had been just a short-neck, albeit over an extra furlong, in the Prix Jean-Luc Lagardere three weeks earlier, so Alson is clearly going in the right direction.

The victory was bitter sweet for Carvalho, who has enjoyed a peripatetic career, first registering almost 900 successes in the saddle prior to a decade spent as a trainer.

Starting over jumps in France as a rider before spells on the flat in Austria, Hungary and Germany, the failure of the Ullmann family’s bank means that he will have to move out of their private training base, which is being closed down, before the end of the year.

Alson will be joining the yard of the French champion, Andre Fabre.

“I never imagined that winning a Group 1 in France would be so easy,” he said, with a sigh. “I’ve no firm plans but I’ll definitely be trying to get going again somewhere new before long.”

If and when he becomes a stallion, Armory will be known as a dual Group 1 runner-up as two-year-old. The fact that he was beaten by a combined total of 29 lengths in those two races will no doubt be conveniently forgotten!