King needs Ascot winner to keep Monarchy at heart of racing

Racing will hope that now he is the monarch, either he or the Queen will take over his mother’s mantle. But quite how the metamorphosis of the King can take place unless he has something to get excited about is hard to see.

Racing will be desperate for the King to have a winner, so that he can show the sort of emotion that we witnessed from his mother in 2013. My suspicion, however, is that the Queen, who like the Princess Royal is genuinely “horsey”, will be the one to keep the monarchy at the heart of the sport. 

But however much she loves horses, watching them finish in mid-division wears pretty thin after a while. Let us face it, most people pay a fortune to have horses in training because they want the thrill of winning something.

The two best chances the Royal colours have of getting off the mark this week at the Royal meeting are Saga in the Wolferton Stakes on Tuesday or Circle Of Fire in the Edward VII Stakes on Friday.

Two stars who will not be in action this week are the John and Thady Gosden-trained Emily Upjohn and Soul Sister. Emily Upjohn posted a remarkable sectional time when she won the Coronation Cup at Epsom. When she accelerated up the straight she broke the all-time course and distance sectional time for that part of the race. Just think how many exceptional Derby winners she outran over that part of the track.

Emily Upjohn is now favourite for the Eclipse at Sandown, where she will not meet her stablemate Soul Sister. The King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes on July 29 over a mile and a half against older horses would be a possible race for both these fillies, if all goes according to plan. 

But one would imagine that the Gosdens will want to keep them apart, certainly until the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in the autumn – as will Frankie Dettori. Even he can ride only one horse in a race.

One horse who will be running at Royal Ascot is The Camden Colt. He was purchased by a tech start-up company (which I am involved with) in Camden that is aiming to launch a virtual horseracing game next year. The idea was to give the techies, who knew nothing about racing but a lot about algorithms, a real-life experience of the factors and subsequent decisions that a trainer has to make when campaigning a horse; choice of ground, track, jockey, race distance, training schedule etc.

As a result of the colt working brilliantly at home since he banged himself coming out of the stalls at Epsom, Richard Hannon identified three races he could go for at the Royal meeting: the Norfolk, the Windsor Castle or the Coventry. The first two are over five furlongs, the Coventry is over six. The Windsor Castle is a mere Listed race, while the Coventry is a Group Two contest. So one could assume the former is the easier target.

Success in the more valuable Coventry would also make The Camden Colt much more valuable. But how do you balance that against going for the easiest target and just getting into the winner’s enclosure?

All of this information and what he has seen at home has been fed into the human algorithm that is Hannon, and the answer is that he will run in the Coventry Stakes. Make of that what you will.