Meisho Tabaru wins Takarazuka Kinen, eyeing Breeders' Cup and Arc

Meisho Tabaru turned a narrow win at Hanshin Racecourse into a transcontinental proposition. The 5-year-old held off Croix du Nord by a neck in the 67th Takarazuka Kinen, and the result immediately put the Breeders’ Cup Turf, the Cox Plate and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe into the same conversation.

The June 14 Grade 1 was run over 2,200 meters on turf in yielding ground after rain softened the track, and that mattered. Meisho Tabaru broke from gate 16, settled second behind longshot Cosmo Kuranda and waited for the stretch before repelling the favorite’s late run. The race carried total prize money of JPY575.4 million, with JPY300 million to the winner, and it remains one of Japan’s most valuable summer targets.

The Takarazuka Kinen has been part of the international Grade 1 landscape since 1997, joined the Breeders’ Cup Challenge Series in 2011 and has offered Cox Plate eligibility since 2019. That means Meisho Tabaru’s victory did more than settle a domestic rematch. It gave his connections an automatic berth in the Breeders’ Cup Turf at Del Mar and kept the door open to Australia’s Cox Plate, while also sharpening the case for a European campaign later in the year.

That European angle already had momentum. Yutaka Take said the Arc de Triomphe would be the more enticing autumn destination, and the horse had been discussed for Paris as early as May 1. France Galop’s 2026 Arc entry list also included Meisho Tabaru among seven Japan-based runners, putting him squarely inside the global championship picture rather than on the fringe of it.

The win carried extra weight for Take, who won the Takarazuka Kinen for the sixth time and picked up his 86th Grade 1 victory just one week after steering Sixpence to the Yasuda Kinen. JRA-related reporting said the Yasuda Kinen made Take the oldest jockey ever to win a JRA Grade 1, and this result extended that record again. The emotional layer was clear, too: Take suggested the late Yoshio Matsumoto, the longtime owner behind the Meisho prefix, would have approved of the rain.

The result also flipped April’s Osaka Hai, when Croix du Nord beat Meisho Tabaru by 3/4 of a length. On this ground, with a more patient ride, Meisho Tabaru answered back. He had already won the 2025 Takarazuka Kinen by three lengths as the seventh favorite, and this latest score makes the same horse look less like a one-race threat and more like a campaign horse with major targets on two continents.