Blast From The Past: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes

Our very first Blast From The Past looked back at Brigadier Gerard’s memorable 2000 Guineas victory of 1971 in which he defeated Mill Reef. Both colts went on to achieve outstanding Timeform ratings of 141 that season, so this week it’s the turn of Mill Reef who went on to be one of the best winners of the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes.

The Guineas turned out to be Mill Reef’s only defeat as a three-year-old, in fact. While Brigadier Gerard was kept to a mile for most of the year, Mill Reef was stepped up in trip, and by the time he went to Ascot at the end of July he had won the Derby and then the Eclipse Stakes, running out an impressive four-length winner at Sandown from the top-class French four-year-old Caro.

Derby winners do not contest the King George with the regularity they once did (no colt has completed that double since Galileo in 2001), but Mill Reef was bidding to follow in the hoofprints of the previous year’s Derby winner Nijinsky who had gone on to win impressively at Ascot. Mill Reef not only emulated him, but did so just as impressively and by a much wider margin against a field that was just as strong as the one Nijinsky had encountered.

Among Mill Reef’s rivals were two other Derby winners. The French-trained Irish Ball had finished only third behind Mill Reef at Epsom but had then gained a comfortable success at the Curragh in the Irish Derby, while the previous season’s Derby Italiano winner Ortis had more recently been one of the most impressive winners of the season when ploughing through heavy ground to win the Hardwicke Stakes by eight lengths. However, much like this year, conditions for the King George in 1971 were much quicker than they had been for the Royal meeting.  

Mill Reef wasn’t a big horse by any means, as was evident in the preliminaries at Ascot, though that made no odds as the account of the King George in Racehorses made clear:

‘Mill Reef, though overshadowed by some of his larger rivals in the paddock, slaughtered the opposition. As in the Derby, the writing was on the wall a long way from home for Mill Reef’s adversaries; Mill Reef was still on the bridle in third place to Ortis and Politico coming into the straight and he moved to the front so smoothly when shaken up two furlongs out that the race was obviously his, barring accidents.’

Galloping on strongly, Mill Reef drew further and further clear, passing the post with six lengths to spare over Ortis, while there were another three lengths back to the French three-year-old Acclimatization who stayed on for third.

‘Mill Reef’s display in the King George established him as the outstanding middle-distance horse in Europe’, concluded Racehorses, and that was something he confirmed later in the year when breaking the track record in becoming the first English-trained winner of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe since 1948.