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Land of Hope and Glory, Brexit makes us free,
Next to ringfence Royal Ascot, stop Aidan and Wesley.
Faster still and faster, US two-year-olds get;
Churchill, who made us mighty, makes Aidan mightier yet,
God, Gosden and Stoutey, give us some Brits to bet.
The quintessentially British garden party is no longer quintessentially British, nor should it ever be considered a garden party, not according to Timeform founder Phil Bull, who said this as far back as 1949:
'Royal Ascot is an impossible meeting. If it weren't for the necessity of seeing the good horses, I vow I'd never go near it again until the authorities segregate all the non-racing floozies and tailor's dummies and stick 'em in a compound in the middle of the track, where they can show off their fashions without cluttering up the racecourse, and turning it into a damned garden party. Curse the place!'
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable.
Try quoting Marcus Tullius Cicero to the treasonous Nick Smith, who invites the overseas enemy to the Royal Ascot gates, actively seeking the most formidable, the new regiment of the Wesley Ward juvenile corps replacing the spent force of the Australian sprinters and joining up with the powerful and plentiful Irish Guards. By right, by reputation, the foreign legion dominate the betting and the build-up to Royal Ascot, ever more so, but this is still a land of high hope and occasional glory, and let's bang the patriotic drum by galloping through a top ten of the best of British for Royal Ascot:
1. RIBCHESTER (Timeform rating 131)
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Ribchester is on his way to greatness, via the middle option, achieving it through hard work, ending 2016 as the best miler in Britain and taking it up another notch this year in the Lockinge. The Queen Anne is at his mercy.
May have greatness thrust upon him in a Minding-less, Almanzor-less Prince of Wales's Stakes, arriving with top billing and the top rating following his reactivation in blinkers in Dubai. Overshadowed by Golden Horn as a three-year-old but has the stage to himself now.
Air miles but no smiles for adventures in America and Dubai, but one was too far and the other too wet, and it shouldn't take away from the fact he was just about the best sprinter in Europe last summer. The standard-setter in the Diamond Jubilee.
The Gentiana is a trumpet-shaped flower that can be found in the autumn, though one of its species - Marsha - is a hardier perennial that blooms for a lot longer. Marsha has been flourishing for twenty months, slipping into Mecca's Angel's high heels with her electric reappearance when giving weight and a beating to 14 speedsters in the Palace House. Will give Lady Aurelia all she can handle in the King's Stand.
Played a game of 'anything you can do I can do better' with Caravaggio, burning up the Haydock track six days after Caravaggio had set alight to Naas. All the data says Harry Angel will be more of a match in the Commonwealth clash than the betting suggests.
Has taken his time getting here, but no doubt now that he's a Group 1 horse, following his invisibly impressive comeback win at Sandown. Adds style to Jack Hobbs' substance in a double-up defence of the Prince of Wales.
Apart from the track, the Dip, the gallop, the tactics and the lingering immaturity, everything went right for Barney Roy when running the smooth-sailing Churchill to a length in the 2000 Guineas. He's been kept cold since, while Churchill maintained his heat in the Irish Guineas, but that's how dishes on the revenge menu are best served.
Almost the flagbearer of Team GB, having worn that rug well when acting as ambassador in Dubai and Australia, and as hungry as ever in the Henry II last month. His first sight of the Gold Cup and first fight with Order of St George, but he's had this date for a long time.
What's more British than The Queen and a Knight of the Realm? In 2016, Dartmouth gave Sir Michael Stoute his tenth win in the Hardwicke, and, after a hard-fought win at York, he's in position - if not pole position - to make it eleven.
The 'It Girl' of Royal Ascot; sexy, stylish, on trend and on time for sashaying down the champions' catwalk in the Duke of Cambridge Stakes.
As many as five of the above ten are owned by Godolphin, yet none of them represent their private trainers, Saeed bin Suroor and Charlie Appleby. And that's the most remarkable thing about the John Ferguson departure: the implausible influence of bin Suroor in still calling the shots.
He may want it to be the principal stable, and it may indeed still be the principal stable, despite its infirmity, but it's one stable all the same, when Godolphin is now a brand, and a banner, but not a barn. Its identity is the uniform, not a General.
The fight is on various fronts, with various forces, marshalled by various faces, but the breeding ground is the battleground, and the war is lost. Coolmore went far and wide, and even into enemy territory, to find the winning formula. Darley have stuck steadfastly to the blue barracks.
It was a different time, but in 1988, at the end of a season in which he won the Queen Anne at Royal Ascot, Waajib was purchased by Coolmore, from Hamdan Al Maktoum. He never ignited as a stallion, soon shipped to Japan, but the one good 'un he produced was very, very good.
Royal Ascot defines many horses, as it certainly did for Royal Applause, who won there twice, in the Cork and Orrey - the forerunner of the Diamond Jubilee - as a four-year-old, following on from the Coventry Stakes on just his second start. Described by Barry Hills as 'the best sprinter I trained,' when asked what went wrong in his three-year-old campaign, which included another royal appointment (only sixth in King's Stand), Hills replied: 'horses are like apple trees - you don't get apples all the time.'
Neither John Ferguson nor the dismissed jockeys before him are the low-hanging bad apples that have infected and impinged the fruition of the finest Godolphin produce. It's in the roots.
Fourth in the 1995 Coventry Stakes, three-and-a-half lengths behind Royal Applause, was the Ian Balding-trained Tagula, who went on to have sunnier days in the July Stakes and Prix Morny. For some time, Canford Cliffs was to Tagula what Royal Applause was to Waajib, as the only offspring worth shouting about. But then Limato came along.
Tagula was a stretch-out sprinter, meeting with some success over longer trips but always looking like a speedster impersonating a miler, culminating his career by contesting the Prix de la Foret before trying and failing further afield. Like father, like son, though Limato succeeded where his sire didn't in the Foret, and his holidays from hell were in America and Dubai, not Hong Kong, and Limato has greater talent and fewer testes than Tagula, meaning the racing roadshow goes on.
The case he's packing for Royal Ascot is one of the handful with that 'heavy' label stuck around the handle, weighing in with a heft 129 lbs, a rating that's behind only Ribchester and jack Hobbs out of any horse running all week at the meeting. The complex problem is it's eight months and two continents since he showed it, so the simple question is how is he?
'I'm very happy with him at the moment,' said his trainer, Henry Candy.
'He's just had to do routine exercise [since Dubai] but it's taken quite a long time for him to get back to himself, and it wasn't really until last week that he showed all the old signs and old spark.'
The word 'routine' is significant, as America followed by Dubai was anything but routine, and a lesser horse might have been soured by the experiences. Routine in this instance means refreshment, and refreshment in this instance means work, but has it been hard work?
'There wouldn't be many horses in England that could make him work hard, if you know what I mean,' said Candy, audibly smiling.
In Europe, let alone England, there wasn't any horse that could live with him at short of a mile last year, bar Mecca's Angel in York's five-furlong funnel, a tunnel of speed down which she was nigh-on unbeatable. It was a campaign that asked a lot of him, for the trips away and the trips on the track, and just two races after the Nunthorpe, via the Forest, the mile experiment was revisited, at the Breeders' Cup.
'I'm still convinced that he'd get a mile on top of the ground if everything was right,' explains Candy, 'but I don't suppose that will be tried again. Anyway, a stiff six furlongs is ideal for him.'
In eight races over six furlongs, prior to a rain-soddened Meydan early this year, only two horses ever beat Limato, and one of those was the monstrous Muhaarar in the 2015 Commonwealth Cup, when Limato still wasn't fully formed:
'One of the extraordinary things about him early on was that he was such a tiny little thing, he was so insignificant, but he looks like a decent horse now. I can't say he looks particularly like a sprinter, he's not massively thick set or anything, but that doesn't matter: we know what he can do.'
What he can do is run faster, for longer, than any of his rivals in the Diamond Jubilee, with the ratings and record - and times - to prove it. His price reflects a recency bias in reverse, as the missing evidence is well-being, but Candy sounds quietly confident, and backing Limato is about having faith in the man that made him, as well as the man on top of him, a different rider called for after the owner ended his association with Harry Bentley, into which a Ballydoyle-shaped spanner has been thrown into the works:
'We had Ryan Moore booked but now I see that Acapulco can't run on the Tuesday but may run on the Saturday, so I suppose it's up in the air at the moment.'
Limato's rider, and Limato's career, may be up in the air at the moment, but welcome to Britain in 2017, once a land of hope and glory now searching for something strong and stable, and Limato is strong, so says the stable. For Britain, for Royal Ascot, for Limato, think on our motto of keeping calm and getting on.
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