The fourth Champions Day at Ascot on Saturday was so successful that there is no need to consider moving the fixture to an earlier date, is the view of several of those associated with the event. Their focus will now switch to the possibility of creating covers that could protect the track from extreme quantities of rainfall in the future but the feeling now appears to be that, even if covers should prove impractical, Champions Day can remain in mid-October.
“Yesterday cemented its position in the calendar, in my opinion,” said David Redvers, racing manager to Qatar’s Sheikh Fahad, who sponsors the day through his QIPCO company.
The Sheikh himself described the event as “the best day’s racing of the year” in a Saturday-night tweet.
“The ground is never going to be worse than it was yesterday,” Redvers continued, “and yet we had fantastic sport. The important thing for us is to have the finale date of the European Flat season, following on from the Arc and the Irish Champion Stakes, a day that can truly crown champions at the end of the season, rather than being just another date in the season.
“We are loathe to give up that spot. The only way you could do it would be by breaking the European Pattern. That would take a huge amount of work to be done, to determine whether it was beneficial to the sport as a whole, and our suspicion is that it would not be. So I think we just run with it.”
Similar views were expressed by Ascot’s spokesman, Nick Smith, who said Saturday’s action “should be regarded as a full-stop on the issue of the timing. The crowd was well up on last year [by 15% to 28,741] and, on the track, Noble Mission’s win was both poetic and historic. It capped a really fabulous day.
“Being the last [of the season’s major racedays] has a lot of merit in it. Sometimes you just have to draw a line and move on.”
Redvers also confirmed that the Qatari interests he represents have been keeping close tabs on the development of mobile covers which may eventually be used to protect Ascot’s Flat track from the autumn rain.
“The company responsible is conducting extensive trials and tests. Their plan looks feasible but nothing like it has ever been done before and there’s a great deal of risk involved.
“For us to put the money in, there needs to be a hell of a good reward as well. So we’re looking hard at it.
“There’s going to be all sorts of testing going on over the next six months, possibly leading to a trial on the racecourse at some point in the spring,” he explained.
“At the moment, it’s at a very early stage. It might be that the first set of trials prove the idea isn’t feasible because at the moment it’s all based on theory.”
Smith said that next year’s Champions Day should be better yet, when the upgraded Sprint will make a fourth Group One on the card and there may even be a fifth, as Ascot is also asking for the stayers’ race to be upgraded.
“It’s not going to be the end of the world if the cover thing comes to nothing,” he added.
Leading Light, the beaten favourite in Saturday’s Long Distance Cup, returned with injuries to both front legs, it was reported, and he may have raced for the last time.
However, Cirrus Des Aigles, the disappointing Champion Stakes favourite, was said to be in rude health on Sunday and is likely to run again in Hong Kong at the end of the year.
At Kempton, Nigel Twiston-Davies’ classy hurdler The New One started his season with a facile success and will now be trained for a valuable new hurdles race at Haydock next month.
