Royal Ascot’s insistence on running half of its eight Group One events on the first two days of the meeting frequently means that the best horses perform for the week’s smallest crowds. An extra 31,000 people would have witnessed Frankel’s greatest performance first-hand if the Queen Anne Stakes in 2012 had been run on Saturday’s card instead of opening the proceedings on Tuesday.
Every now and then, however, it works the other way, and the “wow” factor associated with Bedtime Story’s nine-and-a-half length success in the Chesham Stakes on Saturday – in front of 69,291 spectators, the biggest crowd of the week – was all the more spine-tingling because it pretty much came out of the blue.
