Last week the French Champion Treve (40) suffered the same fate in the Prince Of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot. She reportedly went down scratchily to the start, shifted her ground in the race and ran below form to finish third.

It must be a source of embarrassment to the staff at Ascot and Chantilly that they ended up producing ground hard enough to cause problems for top class horses when they had modern watering systems, penetrometers and going sticks at their disposal. But their failure is not uncommon and suggests that some in-depth research into watering policy by the BHA, France Galop and others would pay dividends.

Treve is now to be rested until the Prix Vermeille where she will face a tough task to give weight to this year’s smart crop of French three-year-old middle distance fillies.

Even if Treve wins the Vermeille, the statistics suggest her chances of taking a second Arc next time out are not great. You can see this from the record of Arc winners who have attempted a second win in the big race (Figure 1).

These statistics show how the Arc has become a stronger race over the years. Five of the first 14 double attempts succeeded but only one of the last fifteen did. It appears to take a lifetime peak performance to win the Arc these days, the type of performance that is rarely repeated when a horse no longer enjoys the generous WFA allowance it had as a three-year-old.

The Fugue (42) broke the course record to win the Prince Of Wales’s Stakes. Settled in fourth and fifth early, in the group chasing the tearaway pacemaker, she moved through cruising down the outside approaching the two-furlong pole before being kicked clear to win in good style though driven right out.

The key to The Fugue seems to be the number of runners she faces. She’s met traffic problems several times in big fields and has now lost all eight times she’s contested pattern races with 11 runners or more.

The Fugue was sick when she ran unplaced in last year’s Eclipse and may have made her effort too soon when losing the Yorkshire Oaks in a photo. She’s won the five times she’s run in single figure fields.

There is only 17 days to the Eclipse Stakes, so you could say it’s asking a lot for The Fugue to go there after such a hard fought win. However, she won the Irish Champion Stakes off a 16-day turnaround and this was her first run in three months. With the Eclipse having produced a single figure field in eight of the last nine years it does look the right target for her.

The Fugue’s main rivals at Sandown look set to be Verrazano and Night Of Thunder. Night Of Thunder is an above average Guineas winner who does look to have a decent shot of staying the Eclipse distance and Verrazano looks to have a good chance. The bookies make The Fugue favourite to beat them and I can’t think of any other Group 1 against males where that would be the case.

Runner-up Magician (41) ran yet another big race. He could not match the winner when she kicked clear a quarter mile from the finish but held off the rest of a strong field.

Magician got into heavy traffic when beaten three lengths in a hot renewal of the Dubai Sheema Classic and clearly failed to show his best on soft ground when second in the Tattersalls Gold Cup. He’d won all his other four starts over middle distances before this and is clearly one of the better horses around in this division.

Having looked at the entries for the King George I can see why trainer Aidan O’Brien is so keen to run Magician as he’s one of the two best horses likely to line up. The other would be Ivanhowe, the top horse in Germany.

About one year in five the King George ground would be too fast for Ivanhowe or too soft for Magician. So I’d be inclined to hold off betting Magician till the day, when we’ll know the ground conditions.

However, the 20/1 the bookies are offering about Ivanhowe scoring a third win in a row for Germany in the King George look so good it’s surely worth taking a chance on the going.

It’s easy to knock the unusual tactics employed by the connections of fourth-placed Mukhadram (39). He’s done really well in big races when allowed to bowl along in front, so it seemed weird to employ a pacemaker and drop him back to fourth in the early stages.

Mukhadram lacks a turn of foot and had lost all four Group 1s he’d contested before this race. So it made sense to try and take the sting out of his rivals’ finishing kick in an effort to help him score his first win at the top level. He didn’t run a bad race.

It’s interesting that Mukhadram has been entered in the King George and the Arc. Clearly his connections are planning another experiment to try and counteract his lack of acceleration – this time by going up in distance.

I’d like to see Mukhadram take up his entry in the Arlington Million in about six weeks. After all he ran second in the world’s richest race, the Dubai World Cup, when attempting to make all the running around a pretty tight course. Employing the same tactics around the even tighter turns at Arlington might well see him succeed.