A Milestone Built Across The Week
Thursday at Royal Ascot is the meeting’s third day — traditionally Ladies’ Day, and traditionally the day of the Gold Cup. For Aidan O’Brien, it was the day a remarkable number finally turned over. The Ballydoyle trainer had arrived at this year’s meeting already deep into a career’s worth of Royal Ascot success, and Tuesday and Wednesday had quietly closed the gap further still: two more winners on the opening day, then Victorious in the Queen Mary Stakes on day two. By Thursday afternoon, O’Brien needed just one more winner to reach triple figures at the meeting that matters most.
Scandinavia provided it, and did so in the race built to provide exactly this kind of moment.
The Gold Cup Delivers
The Gold Cup is Royal Ascot’s grandest test of stamina — two and a half punishing miles, a fixture at the meeting since 1807, and one of only three races at Royal Ascot where the winning connections keep the trophy itself rather than a replica. It is the race that separates genuine stayers from milers dressed up for a longer trip, and it has produced some of the division’s most celebrated names down the years, from Yeats’ extraordinary run of four straight wins in the 2000s to Stradivarius’s hat-trick a decade later.
Scandinavia, with Ryan Moore again doing the steering, travelled through the long early stages before the race turned into the contest it always promises to be in the final half-mile. The defending champion Trawlerman was the one left to catch, and for a furlong it looked like he might do it — but Scandinavia kept finding more, got the verdict, and handed O’Brien both his century of Royal Ascot winners and, individually, his tenth Gold Cup as a trainer. Sir Michael Stoute is next on the all-time Royal Ascot list, some way back on 82 — a measure of just how far out in front O’Brien now sits.
Around The Rest Of The Country
Royal Ascot owns the racing headlines in mid-June, but Thursday’s card elsewhere had its own moments worth knowing about. At Lingfield, Rockafeller Skank put a smile on apprentice George Wood’s afternoon with a front-running win for trainer R Spencer, while up at Ripon it was Miss S Bowen’s turn for trainer A Carroll, sending out Pride of Nepal to a confident success on the Yorkshire card. Southwell and Yarmouth rounded out a typically busy Thursday on the all-weather and the East Anglian turf respectively — smaller fields, smaller headlines, but the same sport, and the same satisfaction for the connections involved.
If you’re following the rest of Royal Ascot week, the full racecard and form guide is at cfox.co.za/predictions-uk.
