It’s Royal Ascot next week and this year looks like being a vintage meeting with many races featuring exciting clashes between the top horses from their respective divisions. The St James Palace looks like being the highlight of the week with the winners of the Irish and English 2000 Guineas renewing rivalry along with the Newmarket runner-up Dick Turpin and Ballydoyle’s hype horse Steinbeck.

I’ll be taking a look at that race tomorrow but first I’m going to turn my attention to the older milers and the opening race of the Festival…..

Queen Anne Sakes

It’s shaping up to be the race that decides the European mile bragging rights for older horses as it pitches the top UK miler Paco Boy against Ireland’s big hope, Rip Van Winkle, and the French wonder filly, Goldikova . The ante-post betting sees the three of them at the head of the market with at least 14/1 available on any other runner. It looks for all intents and purposes to be a three horse race but there are a few things to note before wading into any one of them…..

Goldikova

Firstly, no filly or mare has won this race in 50 years of trying which means Goldikova has got to be every bit as good as she was last year to stand a chance of overturning that statistic. The last 8 fillies to try and win the Queen Anne finished 07246723 and included the first and second favourites (Darjina and Finsceal Beo) in the 2008 race. If you add in the fact that there has only been 1 winner of the Queen Anne trained outside of GB and Ireland since the mid 1970’s and the case for Goldikova is weakened quite a bit.

Paco Boy

and this is his record when he’s raced with 11 or more opponents…..373d844

I think you’ll agree that it shows he has a definite preference for a small field!

I have no idea how many trainers will decide to run their horses against the big three and the race doesn’t have a history of large fields (only 4 times in the last 10 years has the race  attracted 11 or more runners) but it’s definitely worth remembering should quite a few horses line-up in the stalls next Tuesday.

Another slight negative for Paco Boy is that only one winner in the last 15 years had managed to win the Lockinge and only 1 horse to have won the Sandown Mile has ever won the Queen Anne. To be fair the horse that managed to do the Sandown Mile - Queen Anne double was in fact Paco Boy but it does mean that no horse has ever managed to win all three races in the same season.

Rip Van Winkle

Rip Van Winkle spent much of last Spring and the early Summer staring at Sea The Stars’s backside as that one disappeared into the horizon but he got back into the winners enclosure when returned to a mile for the Sussex Stakes. He comfortably accounted for Paco Boy that day, taking full advantage of the 8lb weight for age allowance, and followed up by taking the QEII stakes at Ascot 2 months later. The last we saw of him was when he unsuccessfully contested the Breeders Cup Classic as the 2/1 favourite and this is where his problem lies. You have to go all the way back to 1997 to find the last horse to have won this race on his seasonal re-appearance and back then it was simply a Group 2 race that didn’t take quite as much winning.

Of the three I’d probably side with Rip Van Winkle but as is the norm with me I’ll be looking for something from the other end of the betting spectrum to cause a shock.

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Thebes and Big Fields

There is another horse that’s worth avoiding if he takes up his engagement in the Wokingham next week at Ascot and that’s Thebes. I’ve mentioned this horse and his record in big field handicaps before but for those of you who may have missed that post here are the stats.

He’s a pretty decent handicapper who’s invariably in the top 6 of his races and has won 7 of his 41 starts. With 15 top 3 finishes in his career his form figures usually look fairly good and you may feel like chancing him as an outsider in one of these big field sprints. But beware as although he usually contests these types of races his record in them is terrible.

On the 9 occassions he has run in a race with 20 or more runners the best position he has managed is 7th.
His full record reads 22nd of 28, 10/20, 22/25, 27/27, 18/20, 13/21, 16/26, 12/25 and 7th of 29.

When contesting races of 11 runners or fewer his record reads: 211157123416611 which for a handicapper is pretty decent.

With a field of 25+ runners almost guaranteed for the Wokingham he’s one to avoid no matter how good his recent form looks.

———-

As I mentioned yesterday we’re going for a two pronged attack on the Royal meeting next week with

1) The trends guide covering all 30 races

Available now from: http://www.festivaltrends.co.uk/amember/signup.php

and

2) Gary’s Tipping Guide which also covers all 30 races.

Available from: http://www.horseraceoutsiders.co.uk/

Good luck,
Gavin.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 9:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.