If the betting is correct, Ryan Moore will be the leading rider at Royal Ascot next week for the sixth time in seven years, and there is little that his rivals can do to stop him. No current jockey has come closer to deposing Moore in recent years than William Buick, however, and with Godolphin, his main employer, sending one of the largest teams ever assembled to the Royal meeting, Buick will have partners with real chances from the first day to the last.
It is four years since Buick, then riding for John Gosden, had the riders’ title snatched from his grasp in the final race of the meeting. Camborne’s success in the fifth race on day five was also Buick’s fifth of the week, but Moore drew level aboard Simenon in the Queen Alexandra Stakes and claimed the title on a countback of placed horses.
“He had one more second than I did,” Buick said here on Friday. “It was a great week but I remember going home that night, I should have been very happy and I was disappointed. When I got home, I said to myself: ‘Look, you had a great week,’ and it was, and I’ve been quite lucky at Royal Ascot so let’s hope it can carry on.”
Buick has ridden 14 Royal Ascot winners in all and has not drawn a blank at the meeting since 2010. His total includes two Group One winners and he will have several chances to ride a third next week. Tryster’s remarkable turn of foot will be a powerful weapon for Buick to deploy if Wednesday’s Prince Of Wales’s Stakes is run to suit him, but first he will partner Emotionless against the Guineas winners from England, France and Ireland in the St James’s Palace Stakes on Tuesday.
Emotionless has been seen as Godolphin’s potential standard bearer among three-year-olds this season since a devastating success in last September’s Champagne Stakes at Doncaster. Injury and then a failure to thrive in the early months of this season have combined to stop him delivering on that promise so far, but the “race of the week” would be an ideal moment to start.
“We’ll find out on Tuesday where we stand with him and we’re looking forward to seeing him run as much as everyone else,” Buick says. “He’s pleasing us at home and he looks great, and it’s time for him to get on the racetrack now.
“Before the Guineas, the horse just wasn’t firing as we know he can do, but he is now. The Guineas can come very early for a horse. We can take on all three Guineas winners in the St James’s Palace Stakes, and it would be like a boxer who wins in the fourth round. I think we still don’t know quite how good he is. We think he has huge potential and let’s just hope that we’re right.”
Godolphin, which has struggled for winners at the highest level in Britain of late, is pulling in runners from around the world in its full-blooded assault on the Royal meeting, and in addition to a strong book of rides from the operation’s British stables, Buick will also ride Drafted, from Eoin Harty’s stable in the United States, probably in Thursday’s Norfolk Stakes.
“I think that all five countries [where Godolphin has a base], that’s America, Australia, France, UK, Ireland [will be represented], that’s quite impressive,” Buick says.
“Drafted is an unknown quantity for a lot of people but Eoin Harty trains him and he’s very experienced and he will know what’s required.
“When he won over four and a half furlongs [at Keeneland earlier this year] he came from the back, which I always like. You can get those trailblazers which sometimes struggle to get the five at Ascot, which is a very different track.
“I rode him yesterday morning and he seems in good order. He’s very professional, and obviously he’d have to be to travel all that way, and he’s been on the grass before in the States, but that would have been on an oval. Yesterday was the first time he’d been on a straight and he seemed to handle it very well.
“He must be talented, and Wesley Ward has shown year after year how dangerous the two-year-olds from America can be if they settle in and things go their way.
“I think Jungle Cat is an underrated horse who can run well in the King’s Stand and Folkswood in the Britannia has got as good a chance as anything in the race. Lovell in the King George V [Handicap] is another horse that we really like and the Lincoln winner, Secret Brief, has been freshened up for the Hunt Cup.”
Is it a book of rides to make Buick an interesting 16-1 chance for the riders’ title? “It would be fantastic,” he says, “I’ve come close once, but it’s such a hard place to ride winners. If you are even challenging for it, second or third, you’ve already had a good week.”
