An outstanding week hit the buffers just a little for Ryan Moore at Royal Ascot on Saturday, as he was touched off aboard Ballydoyle in the opening race and then had to watch from an increasing distance as Snow Sky – a horse he rejected in favour of the market leader Telescope in the Hardwicke Stakes – made all the running to win the Group Two event.
Moore eventually finished with a final-day blank as even Wicklow Brave, the favourite for the concluding Queen Alexandra Stakes, came up short, but falling three winners short of Fred Archer’s all-time mark does not diminish his achievement in any way. Archer was, without doubt, an extraordinary talent, and a jockey who was, like Moore, utterly consumed by his profession. He famously used a fierce purgative – known as Archer’s Mixture – to keep his weight down, and the psychological strain of wasting down to 8st 7lb to ride in the Cambridgeshire is said to have contributed to his suicide at the age of just 29.
Yet the racing in Archer’s time, including at what is now known as Royal Ascot, was far less competitive than it is today. Match races were quite common, even at Ascot, and a significant number of Archer’s rides would have been odds-on chances in much smaller fields than Moore lines up against here regularly. Moore beat a total of 154 opponents to record his nine victories on the opening four days, riding just one odds-on favourite and winners at 12-1, 10-1, 8-1 and 5-1 twice as he did so.
Moore has dominated this Royal Ascot like no other jockey in the modern era not simply by winning on horses that any one of a dozen of his weighing room colleagues would also steer to success. He has also won on horses that were likely to need some help from the saddle to get home in front, and were fortunate enough to be assisted by the best and most consistent jockey of his generation.
His victory on Waterloo Bridge in the Norfolk Stakes was typical, as he allowed the two market leaders, King Of Rooks and Log Out Island, to soften each other up before sweeping past the pair of them inside the final furlong. Moore was successful in three of the major handicaps, too, including the Royal Hunt Cup. His partner in that race was Gm Hopkins, a horse that had dropped hints on several occasions that he was up to winning a major handicap. On Wednesday, the gelding had Moore in the saddle for the first time.
“Normally with three or four winners, you could be the top jockey,” Frankie Dettori said after his win on Saturday in the feature race. “But Ryan is on nine. It’s an honour to be riding with him and I think his achievement will seem even bigger with the years to come.”
