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The Turf

Robin Oakley

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

International affair

OK, so they do a good mint julep at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby. There are impressive wonga-mountains on offer for winners at the Dubai World Cup meeting. Outstanding horses patronise the various US venues of the Breeders’ Cup. But this time let’s hear it for Royal Ascot, the meeting that had everything, including a winner for the Queen, Free Agent, on the final day.

The Berkshire course has had its problems over rebuilding. Too many of those who attend are an irrelevance, more interested in fascinators than forelegs, more concerned with tinkling glasses than thundering hooves. (Although I will make an exception for the delightful young ladies who asked me to open and share their champagne on the jam-packed sweatbox which is South West Trains’ idea of how to transport the racegoing thousands who come as a surprise to them in Ascot week each year.)

But it is a free world and this was an Ascot which crammed every day with more racing stories than we could take in at once. Ascot really has created Britain’s first true centre of international racing with equine combatants from Spain and South Africa, from France and Australia, from Hong Kong, France and Germany. And, of course, from Ireland.

I think it was W.G. Grace of whom a despairing cricket scribe complained that he had exhausted the library of superlatives. So, too, has Aidan O’Brien, a man probably still short of his peak as a trainer whose six winners at Royal Ascot took him past the total of the legendary but unrelated Vincent O’Brien. Aidan, the quietly spoken, modest master of Ballydoyle, has now trained 26 Royal Ascot winners in ten years and the six at this year’s meeting, including four Group Ones, marked an astonishing achievement.

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