THE Group 3 Prix Messidor, the second pattern race on Sunday’s card, turned into a course-and-distance trial for another of August’s top Deauville attractions, the Group 1 Prix Jacques Le Marois, when the meeting was transferred from drought-ravaged Paris.

Yet the result was not what the Marois sponsors, the Niarchos family, would have wanted as the favourite, their homebred 2018 Prix du Jockey-Club hero, Study Of Man, could manage only a rather one-paced third behind the Andre Fabre-trained pair of Impulsif and Trais Fluors.