Sectional Debrief: Royal Ascot 2016 Day Two

It’s a funny old game, racing. One moment you can be up in the clouds, and the next you are right back down to Earth.

Just ask the connections of Japanese superstar A Shin Hikari, or any member of what is, by all accounts, a huge fan club back in his native land. Or, for that matter, anyone nearer at hand who had the misfortune of backing the horse in Wednesday’s Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot.

The euphoria was provided by the five-year-old’s remarkable win in the Prix d’Ispahan at Chantilly at the end of May, when he showed a clean pair of heels to eight very smart rivals, winning by an official 10 lengths which looked more like seven.

If that performance looked almost too good to be true, his last-of-six when odds on for the Royal Meeting’s second-day highlight definitely looked too bad to be believed.

It is difficult to give an explanation for such a woeful effort – other than that these things happen – though it is worth noting that the Prince of Wales’s Stakes was run in a markedly different fashion to some of his previous races, as the sectionals show.

A Shin Hikari was left alone up front, able to set fairly soft fractions, but when his jockey asked him to quicken he did not. Those finishing speeds – the horses’ last-two-furlong speeds compared to their average speeds for the race overall – are all higher than the course-and-distance par and underline that this was a test of speed more than stamina, notwithstanding ground that was softer than good.

A test of speed is something which My Dream Boat had already demonstrated he copes with very well: his win at Sandown in April had seen him run an exceptionally quick sectional to come from last to first in a slowly-run affair.

Last to first is what My Dream Boat did again here, though he was never more than a handful of lengths down. He got there in the final furlong and held on despite edging left.

In sectional terms, My Dream Boat “did well”, though it is worth bearing in mind the saying “in a slowly-run race, the best place to be is on the back of a sprinter (rather than, as conventional wisdom has it, near the front regardless)”.

The race might not have panned out perfectly for Found, who stayed a mile and a half well enough to win the Breeders’ Cup Turf at the trip but who has got into a succession of falsely-run affairs – including at shorter distances, as here – of late.

She lost the race, and was probably a bit below her very best, but little standing in defeat.

The intention with these Royal Ascot Debriefs was to concentrate on the Group 1 action. But there was a performance in one of the supporting races that was so good that it would be criminal not to include it here.

Step forward Lady Aurelia, the blisteringly fast runaway winner of the Group 2 Queen Mary Stakes.

Twelve months ago, the US raider Acapulco wowed the Royal Ascot crowd with a scintillating success in the same race, stopping the clock at 60.03s on what Timeform described as firm going.

That earned Acapulco a 117 timefigure based on overall time, so one only wonders what kind of figure will result from her stable-companion Lady Aurelia’s running just 0.11s slower in winning by seven lengths on a considerably softer surface!

By way of comparison, the time was an astonishing 2.55s quicker than that recorded by Profitable in winning the previous day’s King’s Stand Stakes. The ground must have dried out greatly – surely! – but none of the other times on day two suggested that was the case.

Racing UK calculated Lady Aurelia’s final two furlongs at 24.26s, which has been used in place of the original estimate (based on two sets of pictures, on account of incomplete footage), though the 12.0s for the penultimate furlong still seems valid. Acapulco had been timed at 23.93s for the final quarter 12 months earlier.

That reflects a more evenly-run race, and a smaller sectional mark-up, than imagined originally but does little to lessen the sensational impression Lady Aurelia made. She went fast from the outset, and she had all of her rivals in trouble even before the coup de grace was applied at the two-furlong pole.

Her 128 sectional rating (originally 130) is the highest given to a two-year-old in the time these Debriefs have been in existence.

It is difficult to see Lady Aurelia being beaten, as Acapulco was, if she runs off a feather weight in the Nunthorpe Stakes at York in August. In this sort of form, it is difficult to see her being beaten at all!