Seven Days

Royal Ascot was tremendous in myriad ways. Sun up, crowd up, and a spread of results which drew in some of the world's biggest owners and trainers alongside syndicates and smaller yards. Then on Sunday morning came the news that QIPCO is to significantly reduce its sponsorship of British racing from next year. British Champions Day will still be run in its name, and the company owned by Sheikhs Hamad and Fahad Al Thani will remain as an official partner of Ascot racecourse, but Newmarket's Guineas meeting, Ascot's King George...

Outside the racing world it was impossible not to be moved over the last week by the commemorative ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Plenty of people in the bloodstock business will be familiar with the lovely countryside around Deauville, best known to us as home to France's Thoroughbred breeding heartland. The serenity of rural Normandy makes it hard to comprehend the appalling ravages of war that were played out there on the beaches and in the bocage all those decades ago.  I would urge anyone who is a...

On the 15th anniversary of the passing of Vincent O'Brien, his successor at Ballydoyle, Aidan O'Brien, extended his record at Epsom to 10 wins in the Derby. Vincent O'Brien's daughter and son-in-law Sue and John Magnier were not at Epsom on Saturday but several of the late, great trainer's grandchildren were in the winner's circle to greet City Of Troy. Their own family is now so strongly enmeshed with the man who shares their grandfather's surname but is no relation to the creator of Ballydoyle. Just like City Of Troy,...

If you are a racing tragic, and I'd like to think that most TDN readers fall into this celebrated bracket, it is impossible to have a day off at the moment. Trials, Classics, they come thick and fast in these heady weeks of spring. We've waited winterlong, starved of any meaningful action, and now it's hard not to feel a little queasy at the veritable feast of racing which is set before us, course after course after course. There's barely even room for the Cartmel Sticky Toffee Pudding Maiden Hurdle. ...

Over the last three years Frankel (GB) and Dubawi (Ire) have handed the sires' championship back and forth between each other, and they rule supreme as the two most expensive stallions in the world this year at £350,000. While Darley's Dubawi duly provided the winner of the first British Classic of the season when Notable Speech (GB) became his fourth in that particular race - an achievement that is unrivalled in the post-war era - it was Frankel's Juddmonte friend and rival Kingman (GB) who had the bragging rights on...

A person whose job it is to promote horse racing was, rather disappointingly, being sniffy about the Craven meeting on social media last week. I understand that some people don't like racing at the Rowley Mile and, yes, last Tuesday in particular was a little challenging on the weather front. But if you're a Flat racing person, and particularly one who is being paid to tell other people that they should come racing, then you really should appreciate all that is wonderful about these weeks of Classic trials across Europe....

Back in the dying years of the last century I spent some time working for Horse & Hound. It was part of a large magazine group set in a 30-storey tower block on the south bank of the Thames in central London. A strange place for an equestrian publication to be based, but there we were, sharing the 20th floor with Country Life and Shooting Times, the odd Labrador or terrier running around loose, occasionally biting a delivery man or cocking a leg on the coat stand. You can imagine...

The curtain came up at Longchamp on Sunday, with the 'réouverture' being conducted in extremely testing conditions but nevertheless providing a welcome return to action at France's premier racecourse. The most important thing on arrival in the Bois de Boulogne is to make it into the track without being mown down by one or more of the cyclists within the relentless peloton that streams past the gates of Longchamp of a weekend. Everything after that feels like a blessing.  And indeed we were blessed with an almost dry and definitely...

I love Paris in the springtime, sang Ella Fitzgerald, and I'm pretty sure it was a thinly-veiled reference to her secret passion for heavy ground three-year-old maidens at Saint-Cloud. What Classic clues may we glean there? Well, maybe none. But I liked the look of Narkez (Fr), who gave his rivals a six-length walloping in the Prix Comrade last Tuesday, picking up where he left off after winning at Clairefontaine last October. Bred by Nurlan Bizakov under his Sumbe banner, the colt represents that magic Siyouni (Fr)-Galileo (Ire) cross, though...

We've been waiting so long for the proper Flat to start that it seems almost criminal to veer straight off to the other side of the world, but there was plenty of interest for breeders from this side at Rosehill in Sydney on Saturday morning.  One person who managed to stay awake past 2am to watch the highly impressive last-to-first romp of Post Impressionist (Ire) (Teofilo {Ire}) in the G3 N E Manion Cup was his breeder Henrietta Egan, who is based at Corduff Stud with her husband David.  Now...

Yes, I know. It's a bit early for this, isn't it? We usually have a strict No-Seven-Days rule until the week after the Brocklesby but this winter has dragged on and on and I just can't wait any longer. We have the small matter of the Cheltenham Festival to get through this week, and we'll be giving it our full attention, but as we have counted down the days to the 'The Roar' it has been impossible to ignore the sneaky French getting their Turf season underway with a couple...

So long has this column been disrupted by sales and travel that this final instalment for a Flat season that seems to have whizzed by faster than ever should perhaps be renamed 28 Days. That's not to say that we are giving you four times the value, however. The last week or so has been spent in California at the 40th running of the Breeders' Cup. Any racing event which draws some of the best racehorses from a variety of nations is a treat, and with its 14 Grade 1...