Captain Cook was a few months away from landfall after his first circumnavigation of the earth when the first Craven meeting was held on Newmarket heath in the spring of 1771.
It is older than any of the Classics, and old enough too to have the great Potoooooooo – who got his name when a stable lad was unsure how to spell potatoes – on the Craven Stakes’s roll of honour in 1782. For a quarter of a millennium250 years, the first meeting of the year on the Rowley Mile at Newmarket has been Flat racing’s first rite of spring.
