Trainer Andreas Wohler has won the last two German Classics, Hamburg’s G1 Deutsches Derby (2400m) with Dardanos in early July and the G1 Preis der Diana – German Oaks (2200m) with Soreanga last Sunday (2 August) at Dusseldorf.

Attention turns to Hoppegarten for the next World Pool feature – Sunday’s (9 August) G1 Grosser Preis von Berlin (2400m) – and Wohler relies again on Dardanos to continue that Group 1-winning sequence.

This is the 136th running of a race which has a rich and distinguished list of winners. The multiple champion trainer Wohler won it for the third time with Protectionist 10 years ago, the horse he had earlier prepared to win the G1 Melbourne Cup (3200m) at Flemington in 2014.

Too strong for his 17 rivals in the closing battle, Dardanos became the longest-priced winner in the history of the Deutsches Derby, at odds of 84/1. Whilst German Derby winners of recent times have struggled to enhance their records afterwards, there appeared to be no fluke about Dardanos’ victory. Wohler said: “We knew that Dardanos had improved from his previous outing, but we did not know by how much. Winning the Derby will always be so very special.”

At Hoppegarten, he will face older rivals in the 10-runner field, including Hochkonig, the 2025 German Derby winner. But Jack Mitchell’s mount has been solid rather than spectacular in three runs this season, and the biggest threat to Dardanos, who will be ridden by Wohler’s 52-year-old stable jockey Eduardo Pedroza, is most likely to come from the four-strong British challenge.

Sir Mark Prescott-trained Tiffany has now finished second on her last five starts, three times in Group 1s. As Prescott – who won this with Alpinista in 2021 – observed wryly after her latest runner-up placing in Newmarket’s G2 Lancashire Oaks (2400m): “When you’ve finished second four times in a row, you just knew there would be a fifth! But she ran another great race.”

The popular mare will be ridden as usual by Luke Morris, but Saeed bin Suroor has booked Thore Hammer-Hansen to partner Tornado Alert for the first time. Supplemented into the field, Tornado Alert will be making his first start since a convincing success in Munich’s G1 Grosser Preis Bayerisches Zuchtrennen (2000m) over a year ago.

Tornado Alert will be joined by stablemate Dubai Future (Daniel Tudhope), attempting to become one of the oldest Group 1 winners anywhere in the world. The 10-year-old showed that he was still capable of a big performance when landing the G3 Henry II Stakes (3245m) at Sandown in May.

But perhaps the main British challenger is Andrew Balding-trained Almeric. Though the colt, who will be ridden by Jason Watson, is without a win this season, his third to Ombudsman in the G3 Brigadier Gerard Stakes (1990m) at Sandown, and his third to the prolific Rebel’s Romance in Newmarket’s G2 Princess Of Wales’s Stakes (2400m), were both high-class performances. Relatively lightly raced, he could easily be ready for big-race glory now.

The G1 Grosser Preis von Berlin (2400m) is carded as S2-4 and will be run at 9.40pm (Hong Kong time) on Sunday, 9 August.

Image: Wettstar