Yes, I’m biased – but this was a great Royal Ascot

The one sight I was determined not to miss at Royal Ascot was that of the Queen from over the water coming to claim the hearts of English racegoers. The commanding way in which Treve won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe last October stamped her as something very special and she should have been worth going a long way to see. But it turned out that the damp turf of Longchamp in the autumn and the quick ground at Ascot in June were not all the same to her. Although sheer quality brought her home in third in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, the fizz had escaped Treve’s bottle before they left the stalls and Frankie Dettori reported that she ran flat all the way. It provided an opportunity for John Gosden’s The Fugue, owned by Lord and Lady Lloyd-Webber, to remind us that she deserved to have won an Oaks and is a top filly in her own right.