Certainly not the biggest news to come out of Chantilly this week, but Andre Fabre has now confirmed his star Magny Cours for the Dubai World Cup on Saturday 27 March according to Jour de Galop.

Winner of his last three starts at a lower level, the six-year-old son of Medaglia d’Oro still rates as a very progressive gelding and should be feared by all at Meydan if taking to the surface.

Priced up at 8/1 in the UK, reflecting his lack of dirt form, he has the scope to be sent off quite a bit shorter, especially once the bookmakers take out Juddmonte Farms’ Tacitus, who is recovering from a stalls injury.

This was his comeback earlier this month, beating race-fit listed performers Bugle Major and Goya Senora with ease.

Godolphin’s France representative Lisa-Jane Graffard told Race Sharp readers earlier this month in a stable tour that Magny Cours only came back into training in December 2020 following the recurrence of an old injury. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Magny Cours will progress a lot from this comeback and perhaps Fabre is keen to finally bag one of the few top-flight races to have eluded him as a trainer.

France did win the first World Cup at Meydan, with the Pascal Bary-trained Gloria de Campeao in 2010, but that was on the synthetic tapeta surface.

Magny Cours is a perfect 3-3 on the all-weather and his dam Indy Five Hundred was the winner of a Maiden Special Weight on the dirt at Aqueduct. It may concern some punters that she was then tried in Listed company on the same surface, failing to get black type, before going on to run eight times on the turf (winning a Grade 1 in the process). However, Fabre won the 1993 Breeders Cup Classic with long-shot Arcangues and Magny Cours appears to have a much stronger profile for this race than his last runner Vadamos in this in 2016.