The crowds were back (in reduced numbers admittedly), the Queen made an appearance and the whole place got a soaking on Friday. Yes, it was pretty well Royal Ascot as normal last week.
More significantly, the quality of the racing was right up to the expected lofty standard - as the TRC Computer Race Ratings show in the charts below.
Highest-rated performance of the week came from Palace Pier, whose figure of TRC 127 in the G1 Queen Anne Stakes on Day 1 reinforced his status as the world’s #1 racehorse in the TRC Global Rankings.
And the meeting had the distinction of hosting three of the top ten horses in the world - Palace Pier, Prince of Wales’s Stakes winner Love, who emerges as a potential #1 herself, re-entering the standings at #4 after landing her fifth straight G1, picking up where she left off in 2020, and impressive G1 St James’s Palace Stakes hero Poetic Flare, who rises 27 places from #37. (Love hadn’t run since last August and all horses are automatically excused from the table once they have been off the track for 180 days).
Moreover, seven of the world’s top 30 horses were in action Royal Ascot: As well as the aforementioned trio, G2 Hardwicke Stakes winner Wonderful Tonight is back in the standings at #19; mighty stayer Stradivarius rightly retains a high position at #20 despite falling short in his bid to win a fourth straight G1 Gold Cup; his successor, Subjectivist, rockets 95 places to #27; and Wesley Ward’s brave sprint filly Campanelle is back in the standings at #29 after taking a nail-biting G1 Commonwealth Cup in the stewards’ room.
You may think it odd that Strad stays above Subjectivist despite finishing 7¼ lengths adrift of him in last Thursday’s showpiece, especially as the Mark Johnston-trained son of Teofilo was endorsing the excellence of his previous two runs - winning the G1 Prix Royal Oak at ParisLongchamp last October and the G2 Dubai Gold Cup at Meydan in March. But Stradivarius has a formidable body of work to his name, and one disappointing run doesn’t mean he is no longer a major force. Let’s hope the pair get to lock horns again in the Goodwood Cup on July 27.
The charts below show every winner of each of the 19 Group races at the meeting in the TRC era, which begins in 2011, placed in order of the TRC rating they received for their victories. The 2021 winners are highlighted. Click on any chart to enlarge it.
ALBANY STAKES
COMMONWEALTH CUP
CORONATION STAKES
COVENTRY STAKES
DIAMOND JUBILEE STAKES
DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE STAKES
GOLD CUP
HAMPTON COURT STAKES
HARDWICKE STAKES
JERSEY STAKES
KING EDWARD VII STAKES
KING’S STAND STAKES
NORFOLK STAKES
PRINCE OF WALES’S STAKES
QUEEN ANNE STAKES
QUEEN MARY STAKES
QUEEN’S VASE
RIBBLESDALE STAKES
ST JAMES’S PALACE STAKES
Here are the TRC Computer Race Ratings for the winner of each race in each year of the TRC Global Rankings era. The gold standard year is 2017 (see highlighted numbers for mean and median ratings). Click on the charts below to enlarge them.
The figures below show where the eventual winner was ranked in each race before it was run:
