Royal Ascot comment: Cornelius Lysaght on the drama of Friday
With the Gold Cup handed over and the week’s traditional finishing post, the Queen Alexandra Stakes, hoving into view, Royal Ascot’s Friday can be the gentlest day of the week.
In 2021, however, the old normal was certainly out, and replaced by surely more than enough day-four drama for screenwriters to fill several hours of the ITV schedule after Chamberlin and co have safely weighed in.
And it wasn’t just the rainfall, so steady and apparently endless that it made you think that Noah might be spotted in Ascot high street reaching for the keys to his Arc and putting his passengers on standby.
The deluge sparked a lengthy inspection of the sodden track by a posse of well wrapped up officials, trainers and jockeys, but after thirty minutes-plus of squelching around it was decided that conditions might be bad but not so bad as to cause the first abandonment at this fixture since prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home was clinging onto power in June 1964.
And that might have been pretty much that, until the third race, Ascot’s newest Group One, the Commonwealth Cup.
Having taken the lead with one of the race’s six furlongs still to be completed, the Oisin Murphy-ridden Dragon Symbol, twice bumped and repeatedly pushed across the course, to the right, his main rival, the US challenger Campanelle ridden by Frankie Dettori.
It was mesmerising stuff, and seemed to go on and on like the rain, and in a finish of bobbing heads, there was just inches between them.
The stewards inquiry klaxon was inevitable, and as the Japanese-owned Dragon Symbol’s trainer Archie Watson, pale faced and fiddling with his telephone, paced around opposite a rather more relaxed but somehow much more drenched looking Wesley Ward, trainer of Campanelle, the 2020 Queen Mary winner, silent TV pictures from the stewards’ room seemed to show Murphy was having to do most of the talking as he battled to keep he race in his grasp.
As the trainers completed more and more circles, the betting on the outcome veered to and fro; Murphy kept talking; punters chewed their finger-nails; and after just over fifteen tense minutes the inevitable – and correct – announcement of a placings reversal came, the first disqualification in a Royal Ascot Group One since Royal Gait lost the Gold Cup in 1988.
It is a measure of the defeated Murphy that he was able to instantly adjust from advocacy to race-riding modes, and not just win the next, the Group One Coronation Stakes on Alcohol Free, but later add the Duke of Edinburgh Stakes on Quickthorn.
After receiving a four-day careless riding ban, he said: “I’m disappointed for connections of Dragon Symbol – there was a massive Japanese interest, he finished the race in front, but it wasn’t meant to be.
“I went into the stewards’ room and told them I was on the best horse, Frankie said I was on the best horse [a statement that Dettori apparently disputed] but it didn’t go my way.
“Sorry to the Japanese fans and to Archie Watson and well done to Wesley Ward.”
Of the Jeff Smith-owned Coronation Stakes winner – trainer Andrew Balding’s second success of the day after Sandrine in the Albany Stakes, and third of the meeting – Murphy, who was harmlessly unseated after the finish, added:
“I didn’t get a chance to stress ahead of Alcohol Free. I had a plan and I don’t know if Andrew agreed with me, but he filled me with confidence when I told him what I was doing.”
Having personally watched Oisin Murphy – who leads Dettori in the jockey standings with one day to go here by four winners to three – since he burst into the bigtime with a four-timer on Ayr Gold Cup day in 2013 I get the distinct impression he does not really do stress.
Champion apprentice jockey, under the guidance of the Balding team, champion fully-fledged jockey twice and number one rider to Qatar Racing, by the age of 25 makes him as exciting as any addition to the riding ranks since Dettori.
But, as with Dettori, it has not always been smooth: Murphy has gained a reputation for being a party animal on his day – the name of the Coronation Stakes winner will have caused a few smiles – and in November 2020 he was banned for three months after testing positive for cocaine in France, though he successfully argued it was after having sex with a woman who had been a user of the drug.
The Murphy side of the story fitted into the drama very well.
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