Royal Ascot 2021 timefigure analysis | Subjectivist a Golden winner
Graeme North picks out the best performances on the clock at Royal Ascot 2021 with Subjectivist being the most impressive Gold Cup winner in over a decade.
It would be stretching things to say that the 2021 Royal Ascot was a vintage year, with no more or less high-class performances than in recent seasons, but it was an unfamiliar one where fast ground and largely long-priced winners prevailed for the first three days to be replaced by much softer conditions and much shorter-priced winners for the final two days.
It’s impossible to cover all thirty-five races in this round-up, so we’ll concentrate on the main performances on the clock within each age group and throw in some horses who for one reason or another are better than they showed.
Kicking off with the Classic generation, the standout performance of the week came from the much-travelled Poetic Flare in the St James’s Palace Stakes. He not only confirmed the form with the 2000 Guineas also-rans who took him on again but did so in a top-class timefigure of 129 and in a manner that suggests he’s likely to prove invincible, at least among his own generation, at a mile when the ground is fast.
Chindit, who we fancied might get a lot closer, might have done so had he not sat four lengths off him early on, but can only be marked up marginally.
Whereas Poetic Flare looks a well up-to-scratch St James's Palace winner, the suspicion that the current crop of fillies are largely unexceptional was given further credence by the result of a shortened Coronation Stakes (distance reduced by 33 yards) where neither Mother Earth and Empress Josephine, winners of the 1000 Guineas and Irish 1000 Guineas respectively, ever looked like winning.
Mother Earth (third) would have finished closer had she not had to do some running (ran the last three furlongs faster than the winner Alcohol Free, whose 98 timefigure was a step up on her Guineas fifth but below her Fred Darling win) to get into the race, but so too would have the runner-up Snow Lantern who was as much hindered by failing to settle as she was positionally.
Alenquer had finished ahead of the subsequent Derby winner Adayar (the better horse on sectionals that day) in the Sandown Classic Trial in April and without anything of his calibre in opposition got the job done in straightforward fashion in a less than truly-run (timefigure 98) King Edward VII , but the fillies equivalent, the Ribblesdale Stakes, was a far messier contest.
The winner Loving Dream had looked only useful in two starts this season, but in a steadily-run race (timefigure 90) she got first run on second-placed Eshaada who ran the last three furlongs much faster than the winner and really ought to have won by a couple of lengths.
Fourth-placed Divinely, third in the Oaks on her previous start, was another for whom the cards didn’t fall right.
Other timefigures of note among the three-year-olds came from Create Belief in the Sandringham, whose 119 suggested she wouldn’t have been out of place in the Coronation; Perotto (114) in the Britannia; and Creative Force, Rohaan and Mohaafeth (all 113) in the Jersey, Wokingham and Hampton Court respectively.
Foxes Tales (105) ran the last three furlongs in almost the same time as the Hardwicke winner Wonderful Tonight and is on his way to Group races, as is Sir Lamorak who posted a 105 in a deep renewal of the King George V Handicap but found the post coming too soon despite outrunning the winner Surefire in the last three furlongs, a very wide passage round the home turn no help either.
Liffey River (109) and Dubai Honour (100) are others who can be counted unlucky by the same metric in the Britannia.
Pride of place among the older horses went to Subjectivist who stormed away with the Gold Cup in a timefigure of 122, the highest in the race since Rite Of Passage recorded 114 in 2010.
Subjectivist was the subject of a no-nonsense front-running ride that his rivals might have judged by the way they were ridden to have been too fast but was judged perfectly. Stradivarius, Princess Zoe and Spanish Mission all had a minor excuse of sorts, but the ground any of them made up on Subjectivist over the last two furlongs was negligible and, to borrow a phrase more widely used in Breeze Up circles, Subjectivist was far the strongest in the ‘gallop out’ past the post, taking an age to pull up.
Cracks have started to show in Stradivarius over the last eighteen months, but his reputation and the perceived view he was unlucky here could well ensure he’ll start favourite in a bid to win to win the Goodwood Cup for a fifth time in a row, in which case Subjectivist will be a very good bet.
Palace Pier followed his 2020 win in the St James’s Palace by adding the opening Queen Anne Stakes (120). It wasn’t the cakewalk odds of 2/7 suggested but hard fought over a trip that’s probably a minimum now with the sectionals showing that runner-up Lope Y Fernandez came home marginally quicker from the two-furlong pole.
With reigning champion Battaash well below his best on his reappearance, Oxted only had to run marginally quicker than he’s ever run before (118 from 116) to land the King’s Stand Stakes from the much-improved Arecibo.
118 was also the figure achieved by Real World in the Royal Hunt Cup. He was having his first run on turf after an unsuccessful stint on the dirt in Dubai and wouldn’t have been far away in the Queen Anne on this evidence.
Broome ran the fastest final furlong in the Hardwicke, but couldn’t match Wonderful Tonight’s turn of foot earlier in the straight (105 timefigure) and last year’s Fillies and Mares winner will be a danger to all in the Arc if the ground comes up soft. In the handicaps, M C Muldoon should have won the Ascot Stakes but gave the 66/1 winner Reshoun too much rope, while Waliyak and Declared Interest both powered home in the Kensington Palace Stakes and should arguably have been first and second.
So far as the two-year-olds are concerned, the best timefigure performance of the Royal meeting came on the final day in the Chesham where Point Lonsdale posted a 109 to give Aidan O’Brien his fourth winner in the race in the last six years.
The result looked the right one on the day, but only Churchill of those other three went on to further their reputation as a three-year-old, so it remains to be seen how the son of Australia progresses.
The Coventry Stakes went to Berkshire Shadow in emphatic fashion. His Coventry chances weren’t immediately obvious focusing solely on the timefigure he’d recorded at Newbury in April, but a deep dive into the sectionals for that race showed he was easily the fastest over the last three furlongs after a very slow start but for which he’d have won convincingly.
A winning Coventry timefigure of 106 is towards the lower end of the scale over the last decade or so, but he was the rightful winner on the day and he promises to be as good at seven furlongs given his well-bred dam stayed a mile and a quarter.
A timefigure somewhere between 103 and 111 is usually good enough to win the Queen Mary so Quick Suzy, who edged out Wesley Ward’s Twilight Gleaming in 106, looks to be a run-of-the-mill winner for now. That said, the Queen Mary is a race Ward targets above all others (he has won the race four times since 2009, notably with Lady Aurelia who posted a remarkable 127 timefigure in this race in 2016) so Quick Suzy might yet turn out to be an above-average winner.
Barely a length covered the first half-dozen in the Norfolk Stakes and with the winner Perfect Power only posting an 86, the form looks unexceptional and muddling in equal measure.
Project Dante, who ran the last two furlongs faster than the winner but didn’t get quite such a clear run, and Cadamosto, who looked rusty not having been seen for ten weeks but finished faster than the winner too, must have decent chances of reversing the form next time.
Chipotle was one of the more emphatic winners of the Windsor Castle in recent years for all his 98 timefigure was nothing out of the ordinary. Those comments that also apply to Albany winner Sandrine (also 98), who in an Adayar-inspired performance became the first horse drawn lower than 10 to win the race since its inception in 2010.
We’ll get back to including some low-level jumps analysis next week, concentrating on a performance from Newton Abbot the other day that went under the radar but is well worth examining in more detail.
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