THE Morny and Romanet results meant that all five Group 1 races at Deauville’s month-long summer meeting have been exported.

Last weekend the overseas domination was so extreme that six of the eight Deauville stakes races went to foreign invaders and, as one (the Prix Kergorlay) was an all domestic affair, the only home-trained runner to see off the foreigner was Wed, who denied the Richard Hughes-trained Sparkling Beauty and Aidan O’Brien’s Never Ending Story to land the Group 2 Prix du Calvados.

The decimation of the home contingent was summed up in the aftermath of the Group 3 Prix Daphnis where Checkandchallenge, trained in England by William Knight, got the better of the hitherto unbeaten Facteur Cheval by a length, with the same distance back to Oscula in third.

In hand

The winning rider, 10-time French Champion Christophe Soumillon, said: “A few weeks ago I told my agent that he needed to get me on some foreign-trained horses as I have a feeling that the Brits have 10lb in hand when they contest our group races.”

Wed was not exactly a 100% French-made victory either as this two-year-old daughter of Profitable is trained by an expatriate Italian, Maurizio Guarnieri, who emigrated six years ago after notching almost 1,300 successes in his homeland.

But her victory did complete a wonderful change in fortune - just a month earlier she had been forced to flee her stable at La Teste in order to escape a nearby wildfire.

O’Brien again

Never Ending Story was only third in the Calvados but O’Brien did pick up a similarly valuable prize 35 minutes later when Victoria Road landed the €130,000 Criterium du Fonds Europeen de l’Elevage, a mile listed race, to give his first-season sire, Saxon Warrior, an initial stakes victory.

This completed an Irish double after the Jessica Harrington-trained Tevaunanace had followed up a course-and-distance Group 3 success 18 days earlier with a front-running two-length score in the Group 2 Prix de la Nonette over a mile and a quarter.

Eva-Maria Boucher Haefner, the winning owner-breeder, was overjoyed. “I’m in shock,” she said. “But when we saw her odds were 18/1, just like they were for her last win here, we took it as a good omen!”

On Sunday, little more than an hour after the foreign fillies had been allowed to dominate the Romanet from the off, exactly the same thing happened in the Group 2 Darley Prix de Pomone (1m 4f 110y).

Well ridden by Tom Marquand, William Haggas’s Sea La Rosa sat on the tail of the Ed Walker-trained Glenartney prior to grabbing a three-quarter-length success, with Glenartney only losing out on second place to Love Child in the very last stride.

The all-French Group 2 Darley Prix Kergorlay (1m 7f) had a shock 13/1 winner as the Yann Barberot-trained Goya Senora, who won a claimer in January but has made rapid improvement since a summer switch to staying races, overcame the track bias to come from last and beat Joie De Soir by a short neck.