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Arc winner Alpinista retires as injury scuppers Japan Cup bid / Photo: © AFP
Arc winner Alpinista retires as injury scuppers Japan Cup bid
Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe winner Alpinista will no longer bow out of horse racing at this month's Japan Cup, with injury forcing the champion mare into retirement at stud.
The five-year-old triumphed at the Arc, Europe's most prestigious flat race, last month when holding off Vadeni by half a length under jockey Luke Morris at the Longchamp course in Paris.
It was a sixth successive Group One win for Alpinista, owned by the Swedish-born Kirsten Rausing, an heiress to the Tetra Pak packaging fortune.
Alpinista's last success also gave her 74-year-old English trainer Mark Prescott his first win in the Arc in a career spanning more than 50 years.
"We can't run Alpinista in Japan," Prescott told the Britain's PA news agency on Thursday.
"She had a bit of heat in her leg last night when I was at the Cartier Awards dinner. William (Butler, assistant trainer) looked round and didn't like her, thought there was heat in the leg.
"When I got back and when I looked at her first thing this morning, I wasn't happy, so that's it -- she retires."
Rausing and Prescott had been looking to give Alpinista a farewell run in Tokyo on November 27 but the issue in the horse leg's has ruled her out of make the race.
She will now be retired to Rausing's Lanwades Stud in Newmarket, the English headquarters of British flat racing that is also home to Prescott's Heath House stables.
Had Alpinista won the Japan Cup, she would have secured a $3 million bonus following her Arc success.
She ends her racing career having won 10 of her 15 starts and a total of £3.3 million ($3.9 million) in prize money.
Q.Sikora--GL
