Blast From The Past: Diamond Jubilee Stakes

There’s been a new dimension to some of Europe’s top sprints, particularly those at Royal Ascot, since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Choisir set the ball rolling when completing a double at the 2003 Royal meeting in the King’s Stand Stakes and Golden Jubilee Stakes and since then several more Australian sprinters have won one or other of those two Group 1 contests.

Easily the best of those southern hemisphere challengers has been ‘The Wonder From Down Under’ Black Caviar, but her performance when scrambling home in the 2012 Diamond Jubilee Stakes (as the Golden Jubilee became that year), coming perilously close to losing her unbeaten record in the process, doesn’t rank among the best seen in the race.

Two years earlier, though, Choisir’s son Starspangledbanner had put up one of the best performances in the race since it became a Group 1 contest for the first time in 2002. Bred in Australia, Starspangledbanner was still trained in the land of his birth at the beginning of 2010 but at Ascot he was making just his second start since joining Aidan O’Brien in Ireland.

Sent off the 13/2 joint-favourite in company with the previous season’s July Cup winner Fleeting Spirit, Starspangledbanner was among a cosmopolitan twenty-four-strong field that included runners trained in France, Hong Kong, the USA and Australia in addition to Britain and Ireland. Partnered by Johnny Murtagh who had ridden Choisir to his two Royal Ascot triumphs nine years earlier, Starspangledbanner showed similar blistering speed to his sire. The large field split into two groups on opposite sides of the course but Starspangledbanner was always in control on the rails in the larger stand-side group and stretched further clear on that side of the course to win by a length and three-quarters.

The three-year-old runner-up Society Rock returned to win the race a year later (he was runner-up again in 2013 after finishing fifth in Black Caviar’s year), while a close third was the American-trained winner of the Dubai Golden Shaheen Kinsale King. Fleeting Spirit was first home on the opposite of the track in fourth.  

Starspangledbanner proved every bit as good when following up against several of his Ascot rivals in the July Cup, though was pushed closest at Newmarket by the King’s Stand winner Equiano. Although retired to stud at the end of the year, that wasn’t the last that was seen of Starspangledbanner on a racecourse. Fertility issues meant he was put back into training at the age of six, though he failed to win any more races and subsequently took up stallion duties again on a permanent basis.

Despite a small first crop of foals, Starspangledbanner made an immediate impact with his first runners at Royal Ascot as a sire in 2014 when his son The Wow Signal won the Coventry Stakes and his daughter Anthem Alexander the Queen Mary.