A gentleman’s guide to the best race meetings left this year
Looking to head to the races but don't know where to start?
Words: Joseph Bullmore
They say money never sleeps. And neither, really, does the simplest and most enjoyable way to spend it all at once: the racing circuit. From March to December, the British racing world canters up and down the length of the nation – a rowdy charabanc of punters, owners, trainers, huge hats and tiny Irishmen in its tow – filling this green and pleasant land with the thunder of hooves on grass. March may now be behind us (and with it Cheltenham Festival and the Grand National), but there’s still an awful lot to look forward to. Here are the five best racing events to empty your pockets at this year.
The festival that spawned a hundred imitators (and lent its name to some American-flavoured lookalikes) is known throughout the world as racing’s greatest spectacle. Dubbed, in almost broken tones, the Blue Riband of the Turf and ‘Racing’s Richest Race’, the Derby is the most prestigious event in racing’s five Classics. First run in 1780, and frantically awaited every year since, the race remains the most coveted prize in the sport.
The course itself is regarded as the ultimate test of a thoroughbred, and winners require a unique mix of speed, stamina, balance and guile to navigate the undulations of the horseshoe-shaped track.
The purists will tell you that this is a place where legends were built: jockey Lester Piggott won an unbeaten (and likely unbeatable) nine races here, while trainer Vincent O’Brien brought six horses to the top spot. Others are here for sport of an altogether different disposition, as 100,000 spectators – many of them bedecked in the livery of morning dress and quantumly impossible hats – descend on the emerald green turf of the Downs and consume enough champagne per head to tranquilize a, well, horse. Find out more.
David Davies/PA Wire
The five-day Royal Ascot meeting is the jewel in the crown of the English Flat summer season, combining world class racing with a sense of pantomime celebration. Ascot is as well known for its de rigueur morning suits and ladies headpieces (no less than four inches in diameter, of course; rulers are deployed at every opportunity) as it is for its racing.
The stakes here are as high as the hats. With £3.5 million in prize-money on offer, it’s estimated that punters at Ascot spend more money on torn up betting slips than at any other event.
As such, the champagne and Pimm’s do a brisk trade in both sorrow-drowning and celebratory rounds. Needless to say, the parties in the Royal Enclosure go on long after the Queen has left the building, with a sudden boisterousness to match.
Newmarket’s July meeting is one of the best-loved spectacles in the sport, mingling the heat of high summer with a remarkably beautiful setting. Over three days, the punters descend on this picturesque little town, with its thatched roofs and orchards, to take in some quite remarkable racing. The highlight here is the six-furlong July Cup, which attracts runners from around the globe.
Again, fashion at Newmarket is to the fore: the slightly more relaxed dress code allows gentlemen to show off linen blazers, navy cotton suits, dusky ties and Italian eyewear. Find out more here.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Glorious by name, Glorious by nature. Goodwood is characterised by its world-class racing, breathtaking scenery and an all-round atmosphere of good fun. Five days racing sees events across a full range of distances and handicaps. The Sussex Stakes and the Nassau stakes are the pick of the bunch here, while the Gordon Stakes is seen as a good predictor for success at St Leger, in Doncaster, in September.
An intoxicating distillation of all things English, this deeply green and even more deeply pleasant festival has attracted the global jetset since it was first laid on by the Duke of Richmond in 1801. Needless to say, style is again the order of the day, though Ascot’s morning suits and top hats give way at Goodwood to relaxed, sprezzatura chic and faintly crumpled Panama hats (the international sign of a good day out.) Find out more here.
The culmination of the European Flat racing season and the British Champions Series, Champions Day has something of an “end of term” feel. There’s Over £3million in prize money up for grabs in the final legs of each of the series categories, too, making this Autumnal event a nail-biting (and career-changing) prospect for hopeful owners and trainers alike.
Champions Day has a sense of theatre and prestige that lives up to its grand title. In 2011, the astonishing Frankel, perhaps the world’s greatest ever horse, extended his unbeaten run with a remarkable victory in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, before returning the following year to do it all again in front of a raucous (and sell-out) crowd of 32,000. Find out more here.
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