COLOGNE’S Group 1 Preis von Europa this Sunday usually attracts a strong field, but obviously just a week before the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe the top of the cream is usually missing, and this is the case again this year.

Nine runners were declared on Wednesday, four four-year-olds facing five from the classic crop, and the focus of most interest will be concentrated on the sole foreign raider, Kirsten Rausing’s Alpinista, a four-year-old filly by Frankel trained in Newmarket by Sir Mark Prescott. She has already won a similar event in Germany, when running out a comfortable winner of the Grosser Preis von Berlin at Hoppegarten in August, and a repetition of that form would make her very hard to beat here.