The last race meeting at Pardubice before Velka Pardubice weekend was held on a pleasant September Saturday. After frequent rains all summer and in the week before the meeting, the course was muddy in places, specially on the ploughed fields behind the copse, but generally the going was good to soft. Some obstacles were not safe for use, and were either replaced by an adjacent obstacle or were left out.  The feature race was the France Car Prize, the fourth and final qualification race for the Velka Pardubicka.

Only nine horses started. Wavelight Laser was withdrawn after his jockey, Jan Faltejsek, was injured earlier in the afternoon, and injury which will unfortunately mean that he misses the Velka Pardubicka meeting and Wavelight Laser's connections will be looking for a replacement rider.

Five of the runners were already qualified for the VP: Sixteen, Valldemoso, Chenonceau, Karlsbad and Lakreg. Grilias and Polar Pond were not entered for the VP. Only Imbir and Dobyvatel were in the race to qualify. However, both of them unseated their riders in the middle phase of the race, and will therefore not be in the field for the VP on October 9th. The main interest in the race was whether Sixteen would at last show a bit of form, after three moderate performances so far this year.

The race was run at a gentle pace, and all the horses that were still standing were in contention with a kilometre to go. Valldemoso was taken to the front before they came on to the grass track and approached the third from home. Valldemoso looked good to win, but he made a mistake at the second from home. Before the last, Chenonceau, Sixteen and Karlsbad were still more or less in contention, but then, on the flat, Chenonceau's front legs suddenly failed totally. He collapsed disastrously, and had to be put down.

Valldemoso went on to win comfortably. Sixteen faded, and finished third, behind Karlsbad. All in all, it was not much of a qualification race. There were no new qualifiers, and we lost one of our best cross-country chasers of the younger generation.

Valldemoso, owned by DS Sendy Ostrava and Jiri Uhl, trained by Jiri Uhl and ridden by Dusan Andres, won this same race last year. It was his tenth win over hurdles and fences, and five of them have been at Category I and above (he will probably also be awarded the Category I Albertovska Cross Country when the appeal is finally heard). Jockey Dusan Andres said that, on the basis of the way he ran in this race, the horse would have stayed the extra 1100 metres of the VP. Karlsbad's second place will have pleased his connections, but it may well only have indicated that this was not a very competitive race. Sixteen was probably not at full stretch She will need to run a lot better on October 9th to maintain her proud record in the VP: 1st in 2007, 1st in 2008, 2nd in 2009, 3rd in 2010.