Saturday’s British Champions Day is the final flourish to Europe’s flat season and so a last chance to see a definitive championship performance that puts a stamp on the 2025 campaign. It’s what the Ascot extravaganza was designed for, and for once it might deliver.
There have always been too many moving parts to justifiably bill the meeting as some championship day of destiny. Frankel set the bar extravagantly high in its first two years, but he was singular enough to make consistently matching such standards an impossible dream.
Coming a fortnight after the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and only five weeks after the Irish Champions Festival, Ascot has too often come up second best in terms of how Europe’s thin pool of elite talent gets dispersed. And that’s without taking the upcoming Breeders’ Cup into account.
The October date has also left it open to the vicissitudes o
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