Long Distance Cup (1.15pm) preview

Greg Wood

All eyes are on Kyprios, last year’s Ascot Gold Cup winner, who went on to add three more Group Ones to his record in 2022 including an extraordinary 20-length win in the Prix du Cadran that deserves to be written as TWENTY-length, in true Vidiprinter style. He missed the first three-quarters of this year’s campaign due to injury, then returned to action at the Curragh in early September, finishing second when odds-on for the Irish St Leger. That was, on the face of it, a slightly underwhelming performance, but he was fully entitled to be short of his best after nearly a year on the sidelines and he will be very hard to beat if the outing has brought him on ahead of today’s race.

His main market rival is Trueshan, who is going for a four-timer in this race but is also one of the few runners on the card that might have been happier on heavy ground on the Round course. He also has 9lb to find with Kyprios on Timeform’s ratings, while Coltrane – last behind Trueshan in the Doncaster Cup last time – and the Gosdens’ Trawlerman, with Frankie Dettori wearing the royal blue colours of his former full-time employers Godolphin, have even more to make up on the numbers. This might well come down to a head-to-head between Kyprios and Trueshan and I’m going to fall in behind Kyprios, who is still just five years old and hopefully retains all of his potential to be one of the greatest stayers of recent decades.

SELECTION: KYPRIOS

Preamble

Greg Wood

Good morning from Ascot racecourse in Berkshire, where a crowd of up to 30,000 is expected to watch £4.1m in prize money find a new home over the course of six races on Champions Day this afternoon. They will also be hoping to see Frankie Dettori perform at least one flying dismount on what is, by his account at least, his last day as a jockey in Britain.

The sum total of racing fans who actually believe that this is so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye is dwindling by the day, as close associates of Dettori over the years queue up to suggest that he will be back before you know it. But everyone will play along with the narrative and nostalgia-fest because, in the end, it would take a very miserable soul to sit it out.

The betting suggests fans will get at least one moment to acclaim their departing (for now) hero – it is roughly a 1-2 shot – but odds-on chances get beaten on a regular basis. And while only one of today’s events is a handicap, upsets are a familiar feature of Champions Day, when the summer code hands out several of its biggest prizes on what is generally either autumnal, or in some cases, winter ground.

There was actually just 0.2mm of rain overnight according to Chris Stickels, Ascot’s clerk of the course, but Storm Babet had already done its worst and the fact there were patches of heavy ground on the main Flat racing surface – the Round course – on Friday made a switch to the “Inner Flat” track – aka the hurdles course – inevitable. The hurdles course is not watered over the summer, which is one reason why it is significantly better than the Round course.

It is the parched, brown surface which you can see inside the rail in this YouTube video of Paddington winning the St James’s Palace Stakes in June. The going there is good-to-soft, soft in places, while it is soft on the straight course, which stages the Champions Sprint, the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes and the concluding Balmoral Handicap.

As well as the inevitable focus on Dettori’s five rides, today’s racing could also have a significant say in the Flat trainer’s championship, in which John & Thady Gosden currently lead Aidan O’Brien by around £350,000. There are head-to-heads between the two rivals in several of the day’s Group Ones, including the Fillies’ & Mares’ Stakes, in which Jackie Oh (O’Brien) and Free Wind (Gosden pere et fils) are vying for favouritism, and the QEII, where O’Brien’s Paddington is an uneasy favourite at 9-4 and Nashwa is a 7-2 shot.

Previews of today’s six races will be along presently, an overview of the card is here, and you can, as ever, follow all the action as it unfolds on the live blog.