King hopes to mark 200th anniversary of Royal Ascot procession with winner

Times

5 hours ago

Who would have thought it? Something that started exactly two centuries ago, three months before that first steam train puffed laboriously from Stockton to Darlington, is now one of the most instantly recognisable events on the planet. The royal procession remains the key to Royal Ascot.
Of course the racing is fantastic. The opening card alone is one of the best that will be run anywhere in the world this year and there are four more days to follow. Of course, many memories, some pretty blurred, will be more of fashion and frolic and failed fancies than actual running on the track. But what beats the lot is the Royal Procession.
Its official purpose remains the same as it was in 1825 — to show the monarch to his people. Back then a diarist called Thomas Creevey wrote: 'Contrary to his former practice, the King drove up the course to his stand, in the presence of everybody — himself in the first coach and four, the Duke of Wellington sitting by his side. The whole thing looked very splendid; in short, quite as it should be.'
That may still be true today, but for British horse racing, the royal procession does something even more important. It ensures one world-accepted week of primacy for a game battling hard for its place in the life of the nation.
Two centuries back, racing was still the sport that everybody knew. In 1825, the 'Iron Duke' was a fortnight on from having a massive punt on the Derby winner Middleton, as well as a decade in from landing an even bigger winner at Waterloo. Unhappily, and I believe unfairly, today's politicians have steered clear in recent years, although Sir Keir and Lady Starmer did come to last year's St Leger. They should know that if they came to Ascot they would certainly receive a much more cordial royal greeting than future prime minister Robert Peel was accorded in 1829.
'He gave a bad reception to all the friends of the government who went into his stand,' a Mrs Arbuthnot recalled of the king, 'and said to Mr Peel he should have as soon expected to see a pig in church as him at a race.'
One hundred years later, racing was long established as what, in an impassioned 1870 letter to the disapproving Queen Victoria, her son, the future Edward VII, described as 'the great national sport of this century'. In 1925, racing probably had its peak moment, since when other sports, increased mobility, television and wider gambling have reduced it to not even feature among the nine separate spots starting with football and cricket listed across the top of the BBC website.
But the royal procession still gleams as strongly as it did when the artist Alfred Munnings was commissioned in 1925 and enthused over 'a long, glittering line of moving scarlet and gold'. The year may have changed and, at a lapse, one or two of the party may risk sunglasses nowadays, but otherwise the picture on Tuesday afternoon will be exactly the same. 'How shall I write of the beautiful movement of the two leading grey steeds as they came along,' waxed Sir Alfred. 'The outriders wore silk hats with gold bands and cockades, scarlet coats with gold braiding, white leathers and boots with flesh-coloured tops.'
The spectacle may be world beating, but the other parts have to match. They certainly do as the ultimate dress-up day, even if to the point where Ascot's marketing drive across the capital has featured silk-dressed beauties and top-hatted escorts in full stride under the slogan 'Free The Ascot You' — with scarcely a horse in sight.
For if any of these one-time racegoers are to be converted to race fans there has to be some hook to help them see that the game becomes more interesting the more you look. Every race is the equivalent of one of those Agatha Christie novels — all the guests in the dining room, we know their potential weapon, but which one does the deed? Think it out, back your fancy, and it will only take a couple of minutes, not 200 pages, to find out.
There are seven mysteries to be solved on Tuesday and never forget that even the most fluent of theorists gets it wrong at least seven times out of ten. The very first race, the Queen Anne Stakes, named after the overweight Queen who started the whole thing in 1711, has a top American horse, Carl Spackler, trying to knock this off en route to a new career in Australia. The second race features 21 colts only three or four months in from their second birthday, 20 of which have already won a race and 12 of whom remain undefeated. The third has 23 runners, including last year's winner, Asfoora, again making the 13,359-mile journey from her native Victoria. The fourth race features a once-in-a-century clash of the winners of the English, French and Irish 2,000 Guineas.
We could go on, but it's the fifth contest that could take the ticket. For no two races this century have meant more for the royal connection than Estimate's victory for the late Queen in the Ascot Gold Cup in 2013 and Desert Hero's success for her son in the King George V Stakes ten years later. The first, because it was the greatest of all the Queen's moments in the sport she so loved. The second, because in its amazing last-gasp excitement, it sealed what had seemed an uncertain knot between the new king and his mother's game.
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Now in this fifth race, the Ascot Stakes, it is Estimate's son, Reaching High, who must step up to do his duty. What's more, if he wins, he will be the first Irish-trained horse to carry the scarlet and gold silks at Royal Ascot as he is handled by the Closutton maestro Willie Mullins, a former carriage guest in the royal procession, and will be ridden, as Estimate was, by Ryan Moore.
The great jockey will have a fancied mount in practically every race at the meeting, but no winner would mean so much. And it would give one more tick to the Royal Procession.