The Arc: Britain’s long search for home success
Bluestocking’s 2024 gamble was Britain’s most recent Arc win, but Alpinista’s 2022 fairytale remains the performance that defines what it takes.
First run in 1920, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe carries a five million euro purse. It is the richest prize in European Flat racing, broadcast in 60 countries, and Qatar has sponsored it since 2008. For British trainers, though, winning it remains one of the sport’s hardest achievements.
Alpinista’s remarkable year
Alpinista, a five-year-old mare by Frankel out of Alwilda, won the Arc in 2022. She was trained by Sir Mark Prescott at Heath House Stables in Newmarket and ridden by Luke Morris.
It was the first Arc win for her owner, trainer and jockey all at once. That made her only the second five-year-old mare to win the race, after Corrida in 1937.
Before the Arc that season she had already won the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud and the Yorkshire Oaks. Her Timeform rating of 127 and career earnings of over three million pounds tell the story of a genuinely exceptional season, the kind this year’s British hope, Maltese Cross, will need to match.
A short list of British winners
British-trained horses have won the Arc 26 times in total. Corrida won it twice, and more recent names include Urban Sea and the brilliant Enable, a two-time winner herself.
The most recent addition came in 2024, when Bluestocking won the race for trainer Ralph Beckett, based at Kingsclere, and 24-year-old Irish jockey Rossa Ryan. She had been supplemented into the field just days before the race, at a cost of €120,000, and repaid that gamble in full.
A rule change on the horizon
France Galop announced in 2016 that the ban on geldings competing in the Arc will lift from 2027. That rule cost horses like Goliath and Calandagan a shot at the race in recent years, a restriction that will finally disappear for future renewals.
Why home success stays rare
Even with two British-trained winners in the last four years, the bigger picture still favours the house. Just 26 wins in 105 runnings tells the real story: a horse in career-best form, a trainer willing to plan a whole season around one Sunday in Paris, and a fair amount of racing luck all have to line up together. That combination does not come along every year. See our full week’s coverage for this year’s British challenge in detail.
