Ascot gears up for Britain’s richest day at races with £4m on offer

If last year’s Champions Day at Ascot showed the pulling power of a sporting legend, as a sell-out crowd of 30,369 watched Frankie Dettori’s (probable) farewell to his favourite track, then the 2024 running of Britain’s richest day at the races will test the extent to which an unforgettable afternoon can keep ‘em coming back.

The early signs, encouragingly, are that for many of those who watched Frankie sign off with a flourish by steering the favourite to victory in the Champion Stakes, the buzz still lingers. Last year’s attendance for the only British card all year with four Group One races on the schedule was up 27% year-on-year, following a record low of 23,872 for the meeting in 2022, and pre-sales suggest around 28,000 will be at Ascot to watch £4m in prize money find a new home.

Few potential racegoers, it seems, are unduly concerned that three of the races have switched to the tight, inner turf track, where the hurdlers will be plying their trade over the winter, rather than the historic circuit that hosts the Royal meeting in June and the King George in July.

It is the third time in six years that soft ground has forced the action on the round course on to the inside track, which detracts somewhat from the spectating experience. But there will be no complaints about the field sizes on show, with a total of 59 runners declared for the four Group One events, a new record for the nine years since the Sprint was upgraded to the highest level in 2015.

With the going on the round course officially described as heavy, soft in places, it might make for a muddier spectacle than is entirely ideal, but it will be a spectacle all the same. Nor is it simply a question of quantity rather than quality, as two of the top five horses in the latest World Rankings – Calandagan and Economics – will take each other on in the Champion Stakes, while Charyn, joint-eighth on the list, is favourite for the main supporting event, the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes.

Champions Day’s mid-October slot, squeezed between Arc weekend in Paris and the Breeders’ Cup in the US, will always feel a little uncomfortable as the sport’s showpiece autumn events effectively compete to attract the biggest names. To some extent, Ascot has the French to thank for the quality of the showpiece event on Saturday, though, as Calandagan would surely have been aimed at the Arc had his status as a gelding not rendered him ineligible.

Instead, Francis-Henri Graffard’s runner will turn the race into a meeting of top-class 10-furlong performers from France, England and Ireland, and the fact that Aidan O’Brien’s Los Angeles, third home in the Arc earlier this month, is priced up at around 7-1 is a clear sign of the strength in depth.

O’Brien has dominated the 2024 British Flat season pretty much from start to finish and will arrive at Ascot on Saturday with just under £8m in prize money to his name – Andrew Balding, in second place, is £2.5m adrift – and a seventh UK trainers’ championship long since in the bag. A win for Henry Longfellow, in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, or either Los Angeles or Continuous in the Champion would take him past John Gosden’s record haul of £8.52m in the 2018 title race, while a win for both would make O’Brien the first trainer to pass £9m in a season.

It is one of the quirkier stats around Champions Day, however, that O’Brien has not saddled a winner on the card since Magical took the Champion back in 2019. His losing streak in Group Ones on Britain’s most valuable card now stands at 19 straight runners, including four favourites, and even the redoubtable Found, who won an Arc in 2016 and a Breeders’ Cup Turf in 2015 earlier, was beaten on Champions Day in both years.

“It’s always an important part of our programme and that we haven’t had a winner for a while just shows how competitive it is there,” O’Brien said this week. “You have to have the right horse to win at Ascot in October, as the going can be very tough at this time of the year, but we’ve got one of our bigger teams going there this year.”

O’Brien’s eight-strong team on Saturday is indeed his biggest since 2020, but it is noticeable that, like plenty of the stable’s well-fancied but unsuccessful contenders in the past, several of the leading lights were in action at Longchamp on Arc weekend.

Kyprios, the dual Gold Cup winner, is one of those and he looks poor value at odds-on to avenge last year’s defeat by Trawlerman (1.20) in the Group Two Long Distance Cup, while the German-trained Quantanamera (2.35), who is also fresh and goes well on soft ground, could reward support in the Fillies & Mares Stakes.

Swingalong (1.55), who has a strong record at Ascot, was poorly drawn at Haydock last time but has fared much better on Saturday with stall 13 for the Sprint, while Charyn (3.15), the Queen Anne winner at the Royal meeting, has obvious prospects of a follow-up in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes.

In the big head-to-head in the Champion Stakes, meanwhile, Calandagan’s (3.55) form when finishing a length behind City Of Troy, the world’s highest-rated turf horse, in the International at York puts him a couple of pounds in front of Economics, the Irish Champion Stakes winner.

William Haggas’s three-year-old has more scope for improvement, but Calandagan’s proven ability to handle soft ground could make all the difference in the uphill battle for the line.