Never have I lost so much money in a week or more enjoyed the process of doing so, at least until Mrs Oakley sees the size of the cheque I will be writing my bookmaker. Such is the competitiveness of Royal Ascot, I shall explain, that the only certainty of the week is that the Queen’s will be first of the four carriages across the line in the procession.
For sheer quality, style, panache and professionalism Royal Ascot has no rival on the Flat in Britain: it is our one true international meeting. Ten different racing nations had runners there last week with sprinters from eight countries in the King’s Stand Stakes alone including Australia, Hong Kong, the USA and Japan.
One thing that helps is that Royal Ascot, virtually alone among British race meetings, provides prize money to match the international scale. Even on unfashionable Saturday there was £750,000 to be won across the six races, an average of £125,000. It doesn’t happen elsewhere, except on rare well-sponsored days, because the shortsightedness of politicians and Jockey Club officials — and in some cases their closeness to the bookmaking fraternity — in the 1960s lost us the opportunity of funding the sport the way most other leading racing nations do with a Tote monopoly.
But the international brigade can race for purses like that at home all the time. What brings them to Ascot is the heritage of 300 years racing on a track that leading jockey Richard Hughes describes as the best in the world. ‘Whatever the ground, it offers the most beautiful surface …a horse could race from start to finish with its eyes closed.’
French trainer Robert Collet was overjoyed on Saturday with only his second Ascot success in 25 years when his filly Immortal Verse took the Coronation Stakes. His son Rod (for Rodolphe), whose filly Nova Hawk was second, caught the style of British humour when he suggested the result was fine but that trainers should be forced to retire at 60. And Immortal Verse’s jockey Gerald Mosse, a true international ambassador for the sport, showed British-style self-deprecation too. ‘Great ride, Gerald,’ enthused one of my fellow scribes. ‘Great horse,’ replied M. Mosse.
At Ascot even Australians are good losers. Danny O’Brien, trainer of Australian sprinter Star Witness who lost no credit by being placed in both the King’s Stand and the Grand Jubilee, could not have been more graceful in defeat. Ascot intensifies the intensity of Aidan O’Brien: you really do obey when he says, ‘Listen…’ as he did when blaming ‘trainer error’, his own, for So You Think’s defeat. In many others it brings out unsuspected emotion. When Tom Dascombe’s Brown Panther won for the yard footballer Michael Owen co-owns, Owen was in tears. You never saw him that way after he scored goals for England. Fleet Street enjoyed the spectacle, the prize going to the Daily Mail sub-editor who penned, ‘Panther win puts Owen on the bawl’. It really is an art-form of its own.
So, thank God for Royal Ascot, though while we are considering the Almighty what a pity it is that he has provided that the girls with the best legs in the world are mostly dead from the neck up. Oakley’s Rule is that the shorter the skirt, the more daring the decolletage; the deeper the tan, the more vacuous you are likely to find the face above. I don’t think the poet who in 1823 described the Thursday goings-on as ‘Ladies Day …when the women, like angels, look sweetly divine’ would reckon he was in the same place today.
My reservation about Ascot as compared with British racing’s other great Festival at Cheltenham is that at Cheltenham 90 per cent of the jumping crowd actually watch the racing and know what they are looking for. Half the Ascot audience is there to be seen, hoping desperately to make it on to the telly.
For the minority who did watch the racing there were real moments to treasure. Richard Hughes’s victory on Canford Cliffs over Goldikova and his other winners on Best Terms and Strong Suit confirmed him as the superb judge of pace that he is. When Godolphin’s Rewilding reeled in So You Think, an adrenalin-packed Frankie Dettori demonstrated that there is still no better jockey for the big-race occasions. And amid all the fuss about the talented French teenager Mickael Barzalona, we have our own young stars, too, like William Buick, who weaved his way through the field to win the Wolferton Handicap on John Gosden’s Beachfire and give Princess Haya of Jordan her first Ascot success. Said young William, who probably does a pretty nifty slalom on the ski slopes, ‘They were coming back to me so quickly it was like dodging bullets.’ Princess Haya’s deeply competitive husband Sheikh Mohammed, whose Lost In The Moment finished second with Barzalona aboard, did his best to look amused.
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