Royal Ascot: day one – live updates!

Interestingly, the Frankie Dettori-ridden horses are the ones being backed on day one with Daarik (1.15), Terebellum (1.50) and Frankly Daring (2.25) the best supported at the meeting so far. If that trio win the first three races the bookies will be running for cover.

Right on cue a spokesperson for BettingExpert.com sent me this : “Frankie is the go to rider for the public and with a huge stay-at-home audience likely to tune in, it’s no surprise to see a more casual audience turn to the jockey they know and love in the search for a Royal Ascot winner. Anyone who fancies him to have a good day is strongly advised to take early prices as despite his latter rides coming on currently less fancied horses, their odds should all collapse if he starts the meeting with a bang.”

But will we see his trademark celebration? Dettori told the Mail: “I’m not sure about the flying dismount. It is very hard to jump off a horse when there is nobody in front of you, so at the moment I don’t think I will be jumping off.” I rather suspect TV viewers will get one if he notches a treble!

Chris Cook

Meanwhile, other riders struggle to get a look-in. Neither Spencer nor Buick added to their totals last year, when Moore and Dettori won 12 of the 30 races and were also runner-up 10 times between them. Danny Tudhope had a good week, you may remember, with four wins.

In case you need reminding, just two female jockeys have ever won at Royal Ascot: Gay Kelleway in 1987 and Hayley Turner last year. Hollie Doyle, Josephine Gordon and Megan Nicholls all have a ride each today.

Top jockey best odds:

6-4 Dettori, 13-8 Moore, 12-1 Oisin Murphy, 16-1 Buick, 25-1 Andrea Atzeni, Jim Crowley, 33-1 Silvestre de Sousa, 50-1 James Doyle, Tom Marquand, Jason Watson.

Very few racing scribes (reptiles as the late John McCririck was fond of labelling us) are currently being allowed into racecourses under the Covid-19 restrictions. Indeed, apart from the handful of TV broadcasters there’s only the Racing Post and the Press Association with journalists at the track. BBC commentator John Hunt, who was on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning at 7.25 am (listen back here), is at the track and at the gates!

Chris Cook

Chris Cook

You could win a £50 account credit from Betfair by proving your tipping prowess on today’s races. All you have to do is give us your selections for all of today’s races at Ascot. As ever, our champion will be the tipster who returns the best profit to notional level stakes of £1 at starting price. Non-runners count as losers.

Please post all your tips in a single posting, using the comment facility below, before the first race at 1.15pm. There are seven races at Ascot today and you must post a single selection for each race.

Our usual terms and conditions, which you can read here will apply, except that this will be a strictly one-day thing. If we get a tie after all the races have been run, the winner will be the one who posted their tips earliest out of those with the highest score.

If you don’t win today, don’t despair. We are running an identical competition on each day of the Royal meeting, up to Friday.

And please post your tips or racing-related comments below.

Greg Wood

The going news from the track this morning is that the course is now officially good-to-soft, following 10mm of rain in thundery showers on Monday evening.

“The forecast is for a warm day but this may again trigger some thundery showers later,” Chris Stickels, Ascot’s clerk of the course, said on the track’s Twitter feed a few minutes ago. “The forecast remains similar for the remainder of the week.”

A little more detail on this can be found here. The course has taken 10.2mm of rain in the last 24 hours, and lost 0.39mm to evapotranspiration since midnight, a rate which should remain fairly steady if the temperature (around 18C) and humidity (79%) do not change significantly and the wind does not get up.

The unknown, of course, is how much rain, if any, is going to arrive over the next few days – but at least if it does, we will know about it in minute detail as soon as it appears. And Royal Ascot is never quite as much fun if you are casting nervous glances at the sky every 10 minutes, so perhaps “at home” will prove to be the best place to watch the action after all this year?

Greg Wood

In early May, the chance that Royal Ascot 2020 would open as scheduled on 16 June was seen as so remote by the backers on Betfair’s betting exchange that around £1,000 was matched on “Yes” on its “Will Racing Go Ahead?” market at about 25-1.

Yet just a few weeks later, here we are. Or rather, we aren’t. For the first time in a history which is generally dated to around 1807, the grandstands will be empty as the runners go to post for the opening race just after 1pm today, a moment which was memorably captured by Lerner and Loewe in My Fair Lady (without ever explaining how Rex Harrison managed to evade the bowler-hatted dress-code police and get into the Royal enclosure without a morning suit).

Racing behind closed doors is a necessity that the sport will hopefully not have enough time to get fully used to, as without paying spectators, the balance sheet does not even come close to equilibrium. A badge for the Royal enclosure would have cost £125 – which works out as around £4m in revenue before any of them have bought a bottle of champagne or some strawberries. With well over 200,000 tickets for other enclosures too, the drop in income is eye-watering.

The only significant source of revenue from this year’s Royal meeting, in fact, will be from betting, and there are six new races – all tricky handicaps – for one year only, while bookmakers will be falling over themselves with special offers and enticements to new customers to try and get some money into their (mainly digital) satchels. Some betting shops started to re-open from yesterday, but with social distancing rules to enforce and many still shut, online is almost certainly the way to go for punters.

The good news for backers is that everyone can access the online information hub on going, rainfall and so on, which Ascot has set up for owners who have been denied access to see their horses run for Royal glory. It offers probably the most extensive range of information on track conditions ever provided to the punting public, up to and including the rate at which the course is losing moisture. That should make winners at least a little bit easier to find.

The lightning-fast Baattash’s attempt to finally lay his Royal Ascot hoodoo in the King’s Stand Stakes is the feature event on the opening day, since the St James’s Palace Stakes, which normally takes centre stage, has been shifted to Saturday as part of a re-arrangement which you can imagine becoming a permanent legacy of this year’s meeting as it puts three Group Ones on the most popular, closing day.