Face Time Bourbon‘s official driver, winner of the Prix d’Amerique ZEturf Legend Race 2020, Björn Goop finds himself more than ever in the spotlight of horse racing. He was in his sulky on November 12, the date of Crack’s most recent victory, in the Prix Marcel Laurent at the Hippodrome Paris Vincennes. The driver will also be associated with him on Sunday, December 13, in the Prix d’Amerique Races ZEturf Qualif # 2. The man with more than 7,000 victories will then be fully focused on his French winter. He will then have left his Swedish establishment to join his court at Grosbois, the international training center for trotters located in the Val-de-Marne, where all of its “French” workforce is now stationed (around thirty elements) since he decided to close the antenna he also had in Normandy. It’s not easy to be in two places at once, so three …
In Sweden, Björn Goop currently occupies second place in the ranking of both drivers and coaches. In 2018 and 2019, the one who has been crowned the Golden Helmet 12 times in a row, the equivalent of our Golden Sulky, was absent on the drivers podium. It is true that he eased off in his daily presence in the pelotons. As of November 20, he is 46 successes behind (250 against 296) on Ulf Ohlsson who has taken over from the Golden Helmet since 2016. In coaches, he is preceded by Robert Bergh who counts, at the same date, 24 wins ahead of him. Björn Goop’s season is therefore still in rather high standards, especially since he won the Oaks and the Breeders’Crown, with Eagle Eye Sherry, a daughter of Bold Eagle whom he trains and whom he had entrusted to Stefan Persson in the first of these two Groups I. At Grosbois, he will still be able to improve his knowledge of the slopes, he who recognized at the beginning of the year in a report from Equidia that “it took me a little while to understand how to train on new tracks. It’s completely different from where I live, but now I feel a bit more at home (in Grosbois) “.
There is another place in the Paris region where he immediately seemed or, in any case, very quickly at home, it is of course the Paris-Vincennes Hippodrome. “By making mistakes, I made progress“, he qualified in the same document while recalling that in his eyes “Vincennes is the most difficult track that exists“. The France of the races of the driver Björn Goop can be summed up essentially in Vincennes. This year, for example, he ran 173 times including… 164 on the Parisian ash. And with the exception of one, all his victories (18) were set against Vincennes. Since 2015, when he stepped up his presence in France, the son of Olle Goop, himself a former coach-driver, has become the man of big events. The current season is an example of this, since nearly half of its successes were obtained in Group-labeled events (8 precisely) including 5 in Groups I (thank you Face Time Bourbon)!
Six years ago, Björn Goop won his first “French” Group I at the sulky of Noras Bean in the Prix de… France. Since then, he has won nineteen more, twice the most prestigious of all, the Prix d’Amérique with Readly Express (2018) and Face Time Bourbon (2020). Since 2006, the date of his first participation in a tricolor Group I, he has been in third place among the winning drivers of Groups 1 with 20 successes against 36 for Franck Nivard and 21 for Jean-Michel Bazire, while having driven half less than both in this category than his two colleagues. Since 2014, his success in the biggest French events has been over 52%. In 2020, out of the 14 Group I harnesses already contested in France, he won five against three for Jean-Michel Bazire and two for Eric Raffin. The five were obtained with Face Time Bourbon, namely the Prix d’Amérique, the Prix de Sélection, the Prix René Ballière, the Critérium des 5 Ans and the Prix de l’Etoile. Thanks to the phenomenon, he also became the driver of the new holder of the general speed record at Vincennes (1’09 ”4 – fly start and autostart).
Article published in 24H au Trot
