Royal Ascot 2025: updates, previews and more on Gold Cup day

The Guardian

a day ago

Update:
Date: 2025-06-19T10:00:18.000Z
Title: Preamble
Content: Welcome to Ascot on what the track itself likes to call the third day of the Royal meeting, and everyone else knows and loves as Ladies' Day, with the Gold Cup as the centrepiece of the action at 4.20pm (all times BST).
I must confess that I'd been racing at the Royal meeting for nigh on 40 years without realising that while courses the length and breadth of Britain have jumped on the bandwagon and branded one day each summer as their 'Ladies' Day', Ascot has never had an official one and probably never will.
'We don't have a Ladies' Day, believe it or not, and we never have,' Nick Smith, the track's director of racing and public affairs, told me last week. 'It's not in any marketing, it's not promoted as Ladies' Day, it's the public that have called it Ladies' Day.
'There's never been a 'best-dressed' competition, it's more of an organic fashion show because that's what the best milliners and couture houses in the world want it to be. We have a 'Look Book', but that's very much to showcase modern styles which are within the dress code.'
From my perspective at least, the Look Book would have been more use than the form book in terms of finding winners over the first two days of the meeting, but I remain unbowed with more than half of the Royal meeting still in front of us and I'm very keen on the chance of up-and-coming French stayer Candelari in the Gold Cup itself. Illinois, another four-year-old, is likely to set off as favourite, while the veteran Trawlerman is also prominent in the betting.
Elsewhere on the card, one of the big Aidan O'Brien bankers of the week, Charles Darwin, is currently a shade of odds-on for the opening Norfolk Stakes at 2.30pm, Catalina Delcarpio and Serenity Prayer are vying for favouritism in the Ribblesdale Stakes at 3.40pm and a daunting field of 29 runners will thunder down the straight course in the Britannia Handicap at 5pm.
The tail end of the card has the King Edward VII Stakes – aka the 'Ascot Derby' for three-year-olds over 12 furlongs – and a frankly impossible five-furlong sprint handicap – the Palace of Holyroodhouse Stakes – to round things off. I spent a long time looking at this race after the decs earlier in the week and the only worthwhile conclusion to emerge was that it was a crying shame Kevin Ryan had not booked Thore Hammer-Hansen to ride Hammer The Hammer.
The official going at Ascot remains as it was yesterday evening, ie good-to-firm on the straight course and good-to-firm, good in places on the round and the live blog, as ever, will be your guide through all the action from first to last.