3 minute read

Royal Ascot, two five-letter words representing five of the best days of racing on the calendar.

The Royal Meeting has become an international affair in modern times, but it still holds on to its old-world charms and traditions. Traditions such as betting, bandstands, King Charles with his horse and his carriage, and gathering the family around to build a Royal Ascot acrostic.

It's such happy, wholesome fun, we're going to do it twice. Part One below and Part Two to follow tomorrow as we set the stage for the best week in the game.

Part One:

ROSSALION

OMAR LITTLE

YEATS

APPLEBY

LAZZAT

Rosallion

Royal Ascot is set to be R-Rated right from the off. The Queen Anne is one of the week's finest races and Rosallion one of this week's finest runners.

Rosallion runs for Richard Hannon Jr, the second of the Richard Hannon's to have won the Queen Anne.

Richard Hannon Sr won the Queen Anne in 2009 with Paco Boy who came back 12 months on to force la grande dame Goldikova to pull out all the stops to beat him into second.

Another year on, and there wouldn't have been a dry eye in the Royal Box as Canford Cliffs started the meeting in the great English tradition of exacting revenge on the French, beating Goldikova in a thriller and putting up the best rating (according to RAS who are correct) in the Queen Anne by a horse not named Frankel this century.

Jr took over in 2014 and immediately turned out Toronado to win this very-Hannon prize but ten rousing runnings have now passed without another Hannon winner – or one that has even looked like it.

In Rosallion he has one, a miler in the classic Hannon mould. Off the Lockinge - another great mile with a Hannon-heavy history - where he went down but shaped up, just as Paco Boy and Canford Cliffs had done. If Rosallion can trace their trajectory he will post a potentially week-topping number and not 100 seconds after it all began.

Omar Little

"When you come at the king, you better not miss," The Wire's Omar Little tells us.

Anmaat ran to Los Angeles at the Curragh and took his shot. Los Angeles stumbled but straightened and survived. Anmaat had hit shot at Los Angeles and he missed.

From Omar to O'Brien:

"He's obviously the boss at the minute. Kyprios was the boss before he retired, but Los Angeles is now so they will all have to go wherever Los Angeles doesn't go I would imagine."

Aidan O'Brien turns up at Ascot having swept the Group One board at Epsom - doing so without the best of his brigade.

After Jan Brueghel stared down and staved off a charging Calandagan, O'Brien was quick to remind all that he remains a mere Capo below the real boss, Don Los Angeles.  

RAS Ratings agree. Jan Brueghel was brilliant in the Coronation but it is Los Angeles who the numbers anoint. Not only the best at Ballydoyle but the highest rated horse going to the Royal Meeting.

New challengers line up to take their shot: Almaqam, Ombudsman and Map Of Stars have all made bright starts to 2025, hitting 120 or better on the RAS Ratings scale, and Economics and Kalpana return well clear of that bar and packing further promise, but they will have to fire straight and true if they are to topple the 128-rated Los Angeles who is a good bet to rule this division for a while longer.

Yeats 

No trainer has won more Royal races than O'Brien. One of the hallmarks of his 85 winners at the Royal Meeting – and his record more broadly – is that there is no niche. No matter the division, there is O'Brien at the forefront, from fast fillies over five furlongs to classy colts over classic distances.

But if one feat stands out as his signature at this meeting, it is his winning four Gold Cups with Yeats. A magnificent training performance, bringing an aging bull to the boil for such a specific test, but also a great help to those of us knocking up an Ascot acrostic with the letter 'Y' turning up on Gold Cup Day…

In the fifteen years since Yeats, O'Brien has won the Cup another five times and he has the favourite, Illinois, going into the race this year. Favourite but not top-rated. More on that in Part Two…

Appleby 

O'Brien's hand looks a little lighter on day four, and several will see this as the chance to get out of his shadow. None are better equipped to do so than Charlie Appleby who throws the saddle on the Commonwealth Cup favourite Shadow Of Light.

Shadow Of Light's Guineas figure sits just below the winning average in the Commonwealth Cup and he produced it despite looking to run empty at the finish after showing a flash of speed.

That flash of speed was enough to get him into the finish in what was a good Guineas, with nothing of the ilk of the pair to beat him home at Newmarket in the line up at Ascot.

Advertise and Perfect Power have won this decade-old race having failed in the Guineas, able to quickly flick the switch to speed, and neither had run anywhere near as well on the Rowley Mile.

That pair represent a small offering, but the metrics for the Guineas are good: two winners representing four times what would be expected from a random runner and twice as many as the betting has expected in that time.

Statistically significant? No. But it lines up with a strong prior – Guineas form is good form - and we punters are regularly left to make leaps of faith from small sets of stats.

Lazzat

Chances are that at some point during the week we will be reminded that Choisir 'blazed the trail' for Australians at Ascot. This is true, though there has been a lot more blazing on the first day than the last. Since Choisir won the Jubilee (then Golden, since Diamond, Platinum and now in honour of) back in 2003, Australian-trained runners are 1/19 on the final day and it took a good one to land it.

Of course, patriotic punters from down under can lay claim to Starspangledbanner and Merchant Navy as well - running for Ireland strictly speaking but with Australian blood in the veins, and hey, 'anyone but England' right?

Anyone but England indeed. This year Australia can claim Lazzat . He may be trained just north of Marseille, but he made his name (down under anyway) pouring on the pace in Parramatta, a moral victor of sorts in the Golden Eagle where he was beaten by the English in another slight kick in the teeth for Aussie sprinting superiority.

Lazzat set up - and nearly saw through - a tremendous speedfigure in Sydney and was even better back to sprinting in the Servanne last time at Chantilly.

The 'what did he beat' brigade will not like what they saw but the answer of course is 'on s'en fiche' – who cares?! We couldn't see them anyway; they were beaten that far and that fast.

67.8 is as fast as they cover the Chantilly 1200m course and a scan of the names to have run it close speaks highly.

In a cosmopolitan field, this Aussie Frenchman stands out as the most cosmopolitan of them all. And perhaps more importantly, the fastest.