Ascot Champions Day: Frankie Dettori bids farewell to UK horse racing – live updates

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.