Rolf’s Ramblings

ROYAL ASCOT WEEK –  is never just ‘all in a day’s work’

by Rolf Johnson

Royal Ascot is god’s gift to the ‘Red Top’ tabloid newspapers. In their ‘over the top’ lingo, the meeting is playtime for toffs and for excess: for Aidan O’Brien it’s about the pursuit of success - hence his fourteenth Royal meeting top trainer title. His seven victories brought up an unprecedented total of one hundred Royal meeting winners, the first in 1997. And there is every chance that the future is in O’Brien hands – his eldest son Joseph beat his father and everybody else five times and the youngest, Donnacha, is lurking in the wings.

For now, the coming generations must wait their turn. Other contenders may be impatient – Godolphin notwithstanding their slashing victory with Ombudsman that gave the five-year-old, now just shy of £5m prize money, the highest rating of the week. That was as good it got for the absent Sheikh Mohammed. His team had twenty-three losers – one less than Amo Racing. Amo’s millions have been less than magic. The oft rehearsed “form is temporary; class is infinite” comes to mind. Godolphin must surely make a comeback: will Amo ever take off?

The titanic struggle between Coolmore’s Scandinavia and Godolphin’s Trawlerman (trained by the Gosdens) in the Gold Cup and Ombudsman’s (also Gosdens) startling feat in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes peaked this Royal meeting which first began in 1825. Not far behind, personal highlights might be one of the two-year-olds – Orthodox in the Norfolk; Libertango in the Albany; Great Barrier Reef’s Coventry from an ‘impossible’ draw or even Two Thousand Guineas winner Bow Court inching home in the St James’s Palace. Almeriq heading sprinters from Japan, Australia and France in the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee was a kaleidoscope finish such as we’ve not had even at that other international event of comparable size, if not prestige, the Breeders’ Cup.

Royal Ascot stands alongside Wimbledon, the Lords Test, the Cup Final, the Open golf, Henley Regatta as the archetypal British sporting ‘event’. Others occasions may intrude – the Chelsea Flower Show, Crufts, the world conker championship, and a case will be made for Snooker at the Crucible and the World Darts Final – but in the ‘Red Top’ wonderland, Royal Ascot stands supreme.

I’m not quite ashamed to say I’ve never entered the world of make believe of the most prolific authoresses of our time, the late Jilly Cooper (translated into virtually every language on earth) and Barbara Cartland (723 books ‘untranslatable’). They are two of the three iconic Dames – not a pop Group – the third of whom was Mrs Gertrude Shilling, no wordsmith herself but then the other two didn’t have a Newmarket Jockey Club exhibition of their hats.

Jilly Cooper’s ‘bonkbusters’ went (in modern language) viral. Cartland died, still apparently with endless tales to tell, in 2000, the year after Mrs Shilling similarly ceased to furnish gossip columnists with her incredible (in the true sense of the word) millinery at Royal meetings in the second half of the twentieth century. A six-foot giraffe (unreal), an apple with arrow embedded, a huge ‘football’ to celebrate the World Cup among many others led her to be scornfully dubbed – the Mad Hatter. But she was also cherished as the “Ascot Mascot” – a true British eccentric - with a purpose: the ‘giraffe’ just fitted in the boot of her hugely successful milliner son David’s Rolls Royce.

The advertising was a godsend for David Shilling’s business. “Making an 80-year-old lady look glamorous was a challenge. But we did it,” he said. Linking them was Jilly Cooper - “Barbara Cartland without the iron knickers” - one critic’s description of the authoress who’s works typified all that we understand about British ‘values’ – driven by infidelity yet leaving just enough in her bodice rippers, to the imagination. Cooper’s titles ‘Rutshire’ et al, often with horses involved did, unashamedly, what it said on the tin. By contrast virginity and its preservation was at the heart of Cartland’s prim oeuvre. When asked by a journalist if the class barrier had broken down Cartland replied: “Of course they have or I wouldn’t be sitting talking to someone like you.”

And more: “I can get on perfectly well with the people my children marry. What I find difficult is the dogs-in-law” was unsurpassed as a delineation of class and could have been spoken by any one or all three ladies.

Snobbery and risqué aren’t synonyms – Shilling contributed to charitable works and was nobody’s fool. She did ride a fine line – or maybe was ahead of her time, given how much of her son’s success rode on her uninhibited exposure. For the Royal meeting she would see Lester Piggott off the front page.

Would she get through Royal Ascot’s scrutiny today (a member of the Royal family didn’t, straightaway, this year). Maybe we don’t live in more ‘liberal’ (small ‘l’) society: perhaps liberal is a word for those trapped in the aspic of the Swinging Sixties.  Timeless dress codes have since been tinkered with though I don’t see the return of flares anytime soon. Then again dress regulations are still set in stone; and the elite and the hoi-polloi corralled in their respective enclosures. - (nb hoi-polloi Ancient Greek for the unwashed masses).

Royal Ascot wouldn’t be the world class attraction that it is without the trimmings. “Dresses of a modest length; straps a minimum one-inch wide, visible midriffs explicitly (no room to appeal) forbidden. Trouser suits and jump pants are welcome. Headwear is mandatory” still say the steadfast Rules.

Betting was once rampant on the colour of the late Queen’s Royal Ascot. All bets were off for whatever imponderable concoction Mrs Shilling would arrive under – as arresting as they were outrageous. She never made the Royal cortege.

But you could get arrested, well at least stopped in your tracks for traducing the dress code. When with Captain Ryan Price he halted me, and the traffic, as we crossed the road into the Royal Enclosure to bellow about my indiscretion of not undoing the bottom button on my waistcoat.

Nobody was indiscriminately barred from the winner’s circle though this year not all the Coolmore ‘lads’, the Magniers, Tabors and Smiths - the financial muscle complementing the O’Brien genius - were there. But the lads – those that do the graft at Coolmore were mentioned by name by the trainer. He apologized for any omissions he’d made from those holding the fort back in Ballydoyle.

At Ascot the dividing line between classes was blurred by sweltering heat. Gasping enclosures jammed with 71,610 spectators for the final day, a total of 294,541 on the week, a small increase on last year. There were 634 runners spread across the week, bettering the previous record of 602.  The Derby, a fortnight before, attended by around 40,000, would have scrapped their dress code entirely for comparable figures.

Aidan O’Brien (56) trained his first winner at the Royal meeting in 1993 – the same year he received his licence, the same year he saddled a winner on his first day training in his own name. That was ten years after Ryan Moore (42) rode his first winner, aged 16. Moore is stuck on ninety-nine Royal meeting winners until next year.

AI is not going to threaten A O’B. Artificial Intelligence will never have inbred ‘horse sense’. O’Brien’s bare statistics – seven winners equalling another ‘great’ the late Sir Henry Cecil’s Royal Ascot record – hide that for the future he has only his own records to displace.

The overwhelming success of Coolmore is admired – if occasionally jealously.  Schadenfreude is an established human trait describing the satisfaction felt at the downfall of others but the day of reckoning seems far off for the lads of Tipperary and their man keeps delivering.

The media tried to stoke up rivalry between Coolmore and the Gosdens dredging up talk of ‘team tactics’. Coolmore were, as ever, mob-handed in several races and there were some rough contests, bans aplenty but they go with racing in the colosseum, no quarter asked or given. Francis-Henri Graffard is mentioned in the same breath as O’Brien and has raised the French standard successfully worldwide. But even he couldn’t get on the score sheet, even with such as Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe laureate Daryz.

Runaway jockey’s title leader Oisin Murphy had to wait until the last day for his first and only victory of the meeting - on Giavellotto for Italy in the Hardwicke Stakes. Another globetrotter, Giavellotto had won as far away as Hong Kong. Murphy, who guards his strike rate far better than his personal reputation mused philosophically: “I have tried not to pity myself all week; this is just horses running around a field, obviously on a big occasion, but there are far greater things happening in the world. Try and keep a sense of perspective.”

That’s not what the excesses of the Royal meeting week allow. And for all his “it’s all in a day’s work” public face Oisin’s intensity is no less than Aidan O’Brien’s. That’s how they are where they are- at the top. And it’s where they’ll stay.