Image: AAP

Enable’s long-awaited return has been delayed and she will miss Royal Ascot and make her comeback in the Coral-Eclipse at Sandown.

The John Gosden-trained dual Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner has been kept in work as a five-year-old, with the chief aim to become the first horse to win Europe’s premier middle-distance contest three times, but is yet to make her seasonal return.

Teddy Grimthorpe, racing manager to Enable’s owner-breeder Khalid Abdullah, confirmed earlier this month the star mare would sidestep this week’s Coronation Cup at Epsom and instead be aimed at either the Prince of Wales’s Stakes or the Hardwicke at the Royal meeting next month.

But a work-out in Newmarket on Wednesday has prompted another change of heart.

“Following a piece of work on the Limekilns this morning both John Gosden and Frankie Dettori feel that Royal Ascot will come too soon for her,” Grimthorpe said in a statement.

“She will now be aimed at the Eclipse Stakes on 6th July. Her main target remains the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.”

Enable, winner of the Oaks as well as the Arc and three further Group One races in 2017, did not return to the track last year until the September Stakes at Kempton, the first of three victories in a brief but unbeaten campaign.

She went on to win at ParisLongchamp just under a month later, and then scored a famous success in the Breeders’ Cup Turf at Churchill Downs.

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