Good morning from Berkshire on the opening day of Royal Ascot 2024. As the song has it, “ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here/Ev’ryon who should be here is here/What a smashing, positively dashing/Spectacle: the Ascot op’ning day.”
For the purists, there is no better day all week. Three Group One races, the first big race of the season for juvenile colts and the historic Ascot Stakes Handicap over the Gold Cup trip of two-and-a-half miles all feature on the programme, and the jam on the mid-afternoon scone this year is that for the first time since 2016, this year’s running of the St James’s Palace Stakes will include the winners of the 2,000 Guineas in England, Ireland and France.
The weather, for the moment at least, is also playing ball, with the going assessed as good-to-firm after 5mm of watering overnight. There is very little difference between the two sides of the straight course, either, with the GoingStick reading 8.1 on the far side and 8.0 against the stand rail. Friday is currently forecast to be the only day all week with much chance of a significant shower, so fingers crossed.
There is always a slightly otherworldly feel about Royal Ascot, as if it is frozen in an ever-repeating loop with minor tweaks to the hats and hemlines, but there are, of course, all sorts of other things going on this year, both within the racing bubble and outside.
The crowd figures this week will be scrutinised for any sign that the royal meeting is suffering from the same, abrupt decline in attendance that has afflicted Cheltenham and Aintree in particular this year. The sport’s prospects under a new Labour government – it’s a 1-33 chance on Betfair – will also be keenly discussed by the racing bigwigs in attendance.
Picks for all seven races on the Tuesday card are here, the Queen Anne Stakes is due off at 2.30pm and the royal procession, if you’re into that kind of thing, will be heading down the course at around 2pm. As ever, there’s no official confirmation as yet that the King and Queen will be here, but as they’ve renamed the third race on the card in his honour, it would be rather rude not to.