19TH JUNE 2025
THE TIMES
Racing, at the finish at least, is almost always an optical illusion. An overtaking winner is not “quickening up” but just slowing down less than his rival. What makes Ombudsman’s performance in winning the Prince Of Wales Stakes special is this time he was actually going faster than before.
The reason he did so was because for once the Ballydoyle team overcooked things. Favourite Los Angeles had Continuous in as a pacemaker and they went such a lick that both clocked over 41 mph for the second furlong. All the way up the long Ascot shoulder the hectic gallop continued, Continous, doing “domestique” duties for his team leader with the others strung out in their wake. We knew what they were doing. They were trying to run the strength out of Ombudsman and main rival Anmaat.
At this stage, significantly, those two were second last and third last of the 8 runners with the filly See The Fire ahead of them. Into the straight and Ryan Moore launched Los Angeles for the line. The big colt struggled mightily but he had used up too much juice. Royal Champion and the French horse Facteur Cheval loomed up on his outside, See The Fire battled up the inner and Jim Crowley swept up outside them all on Anmaat in what looked like a winning play.
But William Buick had a lot of horse underneath him and for quite a few strides nowhere to go. Without room on the inner an escape to the outside was rightly blocked by the overtaking Crowley and he finally had to opt to pull round everything and hope for a finishing kick. Which he got with a vengeance, eating up the ground to put two lengths between him and Anmaat at the post with See The Fire another two and a half lengths third, the other French horse Map Of The Stars fourth and Los Angeles a rather weary seven length fifth with the faithful Continous a now distant whipper in.
Thanks to RaceIQ using the Longines data, Ascot now offers this greatest of all equine athletics meetings the sort of statistical analysis long seen as essential in assessing races on two legs rather than four. So while Anmaat’s final three furlongs were run in a slowing 11.85, 11.91 and 12.35 seconds, down from 37.04 mph to 37.78 to 35.05, Ombudsman ran 11.88 before a blocked 12.07 seconds before quickening to close in 11.82, clocking 37.88 mph then that baulked 37.28 and a final 38.07 mph to the line.
At last we have exactly what happened not just the testimonies of participants and witnesses however wise. What we don’t have is how this will translate to the future.
For while William Buick could say “he’s a cool, talented horse and I think that was just a taste of what’s to come, for sure as he’s still got very few miles on the clock”, it’s trainer John Gosden who has to handle a delicious if unexpected dilemma.
Because after this 10 furlong top level triumph for the four year old whom Godolphin bought as a yearling and Gosden did not run until last June and has now won five of his six races, is the Eclipse Stakes over the same distance and then the Juddmonte over that same mile and a quarter trip. But there is a snag. The Juddmonte is sponsored by Field Of Gold’s owners who will surely want their flag carrier to be a player if possible. The trainer who, with his son Thady had won the race before Ombudsman’s with Crimson Advocate adding to two Royal Ascot winners yesterday, ducked the question of in-stable competition. “It will not be my decision,” he said with a smile before later accepting a commemorative saddle cloth in recognition of a 70th victory at the royal meeting.
What Gosden did know was that his day was not done and even these four winners would pale in wider public esteem if he could pull off another with a royal victory in the Kensington Palace Stakes. The King and Queen’s Rainbow’s Edge is a lovely chestnut, the same colour as Desert Hero who so famously carried to scarlet and gold to “hats-off-for-the-king” victory. But despite the Queen enlisting such wonderful scribes as Anthony Horowitz on Tuesday and Robert Harris yesterday as guests in the royal carriage there was to be no storybook ending.
At 3-1 in a field of 24 Rainbow’s Edge was almost as short a priced favourite as Reaching High had been in the royal silks before finishing a luckless 9th in Tuesday’s Ascot Stakes. There were no hard luck stories in her 7th placed finish. Their majesties were merely having to accept that all too often it’s not illusion but delusion that ends the afternoon.