The Premio Pisa and Ribot: the beginning of a legend

The Premio Pisa is an extremely important 1.500 meter race held every year during the racing season at the San Rossore racecorse. In accordance with the indications of the international calendar, this race, after being for a long time a Group 3 race has now become a Listed Race. In the history of Italian and European gallop The Premio Pisa has long represented the first race to open the calendar of the “classic” races becoming in this way an extremely significant test. When the national calendar had less pressing engagements the Premio Pisa was the first race in preparation of the Derby. In fact if one observes the names of the winners of the Premio Pisa one finds eleven gallop Derby winners. The first Premio Pisa was held in 1885 and the first winner was Rosenberg who two months later won the second Italian gallop Derby. Other horses who won the Premio Pisa have become legends in the history of Italian horseracing: Filiberto (1888), Goldoni (1896), Guido Reni (1911), Fausta (1914), Giampietrina (1917), Nogara (1931), Archidamia (1936). Even after the war, though the map of European gallop races was changing, the Premio Pisa maintained the qualifying characteristics of a great trial race before the opening of the “classic” season: Orvieto (1954), Weimar (1971), Capo Bon (1977), Stone (1978) up to the very recent Morigi (1994) have all been important and influential horses in the history of Italian gallop.

Special mention should go to Ribot, the horse that won the 1955 Premio Pisa with an incredible advantage over the other horses. He remained undefeated in the 16 races run in Italy and abroad and he later went to the United States as studhorse and is considered under many aspects the horse of the century. The son of Tenerani and Romanella, a Razza Dolmello Olgiata homebred, wintered at the Barbaricina stables, training at San Rossore where the memory of a horse that won the Arc de Triomphe two years in a row (1956 – 1956)and the King George (1956) is still extremely vivid. Ribot died in the United States in 1972 at the age of 20.

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