Freddy Head’s son landed Poule d’Essai des Pouliches with star filly Blue Rose Cen for an owner who has transformed his approach to training – and now he’s got major hopes in both French Derby and Oaks, as he tells Julian Muscat
France: When Christopher Head saddled Blue Rose Cen to win the Poule d’Essai des Pouliches earlier this month, it bore all the hallmarks of an old hand at work.
Last season’s champion two-year-old filly in France started at odds-on to land the one-mile classic and duly obliged with the minimum of fuss. Her victory was absolute, in the process making it seem as though Head had been plundering big races for years on end.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Blue Rose Cen was a baptismal Classic triumph for the 36-year-old, who has been training 
for fewer than five seasons. But then, he does come with a bit of pedigree.
Head is a fifth-generation descendent of his family to excel in the Thoroughbred business. He is the son of Freddy, the multiple champion jockey-turned-trainer, and a grandson of Alec, who is akin to French racing royalty. It was Alec’s grandfather, William Sr., who ventured from Britain to ride in France way back in 1882.
The one sad note within an uplifting story is that Alec Head passed away last June. “I wish he could have been at ParisLongchamp to see Blue Rose Cen, because he would have loved it,” Christopher says, sotto voce. “My grandfather did more than anybody to take us to the top as a family.”
Prix de Diane target
Alec would doubtless have agreed that Blue Rose Cen’s next port of call should be the Prix de Diane on June 18. He himself trained two winners of the fillies’ Classic but his piece de resistance took the shape of the mighty Treve, the Diane winner 10 years ago whom he bred at his Haras du Quesnay, in Normandy.
Unsurprisingly, Blue Rose Cen heads the market for Prix de Diane, with Head confident that the 10½-furlong trip is within the daughter of Churchill’s range.
“I think she is a 2,000-metre (10 furlong) filly on pedigree but we didn’t want to send her over that distance until after the Pouliches,” Head says. “She won the Prix Marcel Boussac (G1) last season so we knew she would be happy over the course and distance at ParisLongchamp. Luckily, everything worked out.”
Before Blue Rose Cen’s Diane bid, however, Head will also saddle Big Rock, a red-hot favourite for the Prix du Jockey Club (French Derby) on June 4. Having taken over the colt from Mathieu Brasme as a maiden in February, Head dispatched him to win four races on the bounce, culminating with a five-length romp in the G3 Prix de Guiche earlier this month.
“When Big Rock goes off in front at his pace, he exhausts his opponents,” Head enthuses. “His cruising speed is incredible; they cannot keep up with him.”
Career-defining season
All in all, it has the makings of a defining season for Head, who moved into stables he bought from his father on the latter’s retirement last winter. Before that he’d rented some boxes at Chantilly when he struck out on his own towards the end of 2018.
It was a humble beginning, with half a dozen two-year-olds and a handful of wizened older horses. But Head was determined to make his own imprint rather than train under the wing of his accomplished father.
“I wanted my personality to come through,” he says, “I was 12 years with my father and got to know some of his owners quite well, but I wanted to build something new.
“I wanted my owners to have confidence in me, so I needed to be seen as the one in charge,” he continues. “We have built a young team and found new owners, but the most important thing was for everyone to know that I was making all the decisions – good and bad.”
Head’s big break came soon after he opened for business, when he sat next to Leopoldo Fernandez Pujals at a lunch. At the end of it Pujals, who had just entered the business as an owner-breeder, told Head he would send him a horse.
“Leopoldo kept his word,” Head says. “The first horse he sent me was Sibila Spain, who was my first Group winner (in the Prix du Muguet) last year. But he also asked me to take a different approach. He wanted me to find something new, something scientific that would make us better in the way we train horses.”
Bringing innovation to tradition
That’s when Head alighted on Arioneo, a data-collecting box strapped to a horse’s girth that records its speed at the gallop and its cardiovascular activity both before and after exercise, together with a raft of information like stride patterns that helps to create an individual profile for each horse.
“I wanted to bring a bit of innovation to the family tradition,” Head says. “I thought it was important for me to get a better idea of how to prepare horses. If I can learn from the data I have been collecting, I can adapt my training techniques to suit each horse. It will enable me to put horses on the right path, and it makes me feel like I am a better trainer.”
Arioneo is a tool to use in conjunction with more traditional training methods and the data it spawns can be interpreted in different ways. For his part, Head is particularly interested in cardiovascular data like optimal heartbeats at exercise and recovery rates, which differ from horse-to-horse.
“It doesn’t give you everything but it has become a big part of my recipe,” Head says. “I use it all the time and find it very interesting. I’m sure it will become an essential part of training horses in the future.”
That chance meeting with Pujals was to prove a game-changer. Born in Cuba to an affluent Spanish family which fled to Miami when the Cuban government was overthrown in 1959, Pujals enlisted with the US Marines and fought in the Vietnam War before settling in Spain.
The small pizza parlour he opened in a suburb of Madrid in 1987 quickly grew into Telepizza, a nationwide delivery business which became the darling of the stock exchange on its flotation.
Pujals eventually sold the diversified business in 1999 for a reported €300 million, by which time he’d established Yeguada Centurion, a stud farm breeding purebred Spanish horses. He entered the Thoroughbred business in 2019 when making a string of expensive purchases, spending $3.3m on 16 broodmares at Keeneland alone.
As with his business ventures, it did not take Pujals long to strike equine gold. He bred both Blue Rose Cen and Big Rock under his Yeguada Centurion banner, and devours any literature on breeding theories he can get his hands on.
Outside the box
“Leopoldo is a very smart man who approaches every project by trying to think outside the box,” Head says. “He is really focused on his breeding programme in France and it has been inspiring to work with him. I feel like I am improving all the time when I discuss things with him.”
It helped Head that he assisted his father in the years when the likes of Goldikova, Moonlight Cloud and Solow were running riot. “I was able to see the difference between regular horses and top-class horses,” he says. “If a really good horse came my way, I already knew what path to put it on.”
Freddy Head drops into the yard from time to time, although he is mindful to stay in the shadows. He keeps a respectful distance from the horses when they exercise and stops short of proffering advice unless he is asked.
“I respect him for that,” Head says. “He has been a brilliant mentor and is still a source of inspiration for me. Everything I know about racing is from him.”
It took Freddy nine years before he saddled his first G1 winner when Marchand D’Or won the 2007 Prix Maurice de Gheest, whereas it took Christopher just four years to make that breakthrough.
“Yes,” Christopher says, “but what my father achieved afterwards was remarkable. He won eight Group 1 races in one season, and more than 40 in all. It will be very hard to even get close to that. I’m not even thinking about it right now.”
At the rate he is going Christopher may have to give the matter due attention sooner than he thinks.
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