Timeform's Billy Nash looks at the Prince Of Wales's Stakes winning performance from Ombudsman.
Billy Nash: Ombudsman likely for mid to high 120s
Day two at Royal Ascot and a lot of the pre-race chat was about the possibility of Los Angeles, the favourite for the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, providing Aidan O’Brien and Ryan Moore with their 150th Group One victory together.
However, although their day got off to the perfect start courtesy of True Love in the Queen Mary, it was the father and son team of John and Thady Gosden who took the day’s feature event.
The race itself went largely as we expected, Continuous soon to the fore and ensuring it was a thorough test at the trip but a quick glance at the sectional times would suggest that the leaders went a bit too fast – a point underlined by the fact that Continuous hit a top speed of 42.3 mph which is quicker than all bar one of the fillies managed in the Queen Mary.
The contest was therefore set up for closers and, having been delivered latest of all, it was Ombudsman who picked up best to win going away from Anmaat. With that taken into account it seems Ombudsman is likely to have run to a Timeform rating in the mid to high 120s, which compares favourably with many of the recent winners of the race and is in the same ballpark as the likes of the Gosden-trained Mostahdaf (129) in 2023 and Lord North (128) in 2020.
It was, of course, the second leg of a big race double for team Gosden who, just 40 minutes earlier, had produced Crimson Advocate to land the Duke of Cambridge Stakes in the hands of James McDonald.
Successful in the Queen Mary on this day two years earlier, when trained in the States by George Weaver, she has been reinvented as a miler this year and a provisional mark of something in or around 114 represents a career-best effort for her.
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