On the outskirts of London last week, a sporting event with big ambitions launched amid a storm of questioning as to the origins and purpose of its gargantuan financial resource. This week, it will be racing in the spotlight, as Royal Ascot gets underway.
Where the petrodollar has been a newly-disruptive influence in football, boxing and most recently golf, following Saudi Arabia’s arrival and the advent of the LIV circus, British Flat racing has been in thrall to Middle Eastern wealth for decades.
Some of the individuals involved have been controversial figures in their own right, others simply tarnished by their links to despot regimes.
There were outpourings of grief, for instance, at the deaths last year of Khalid Abdullah and Sheikh Hamdan al-Maktoum, two giants of the game who gave far more to it than they ever got back.
The former was a member of the Saudi royal family, who bred and owned the likes of Frankel and Enable, the latter a deputy ruler of Dubai and the UAE’s finance minister, who was leading owner at Royal Ascot only two years ago.
To Flat racing, uncomfortable questions over its funding are nothing new, but as its premier meeting begins against the backdrop of intensifying scrutiny elsewhere in the sporting world, they may just be asked a little more regularly and loudly.
That will be particularly true in the case of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, vice-president and prime minister of the UAE and just about the most powerful man in British racing, founder of Godolphin, which has been champion owner 14 times and was expected to celebrate a winner on the opening afternoon, with Coroebus a short-priced favourite in the St. James’s Palace Stakes.
This year’s will be the first Royal meeting since a UK civil court last December ordered Sheikh Mohammed to pay a divorce settlement of more than half-a-billion pounds to his former wife and their two children, in part to cover a lifetime of security costs to protect them from what the judge called the “grave risk” posed by the sheikh himself.
While the royal blue silks of Godolphin remain as prominent as ever on British racecourses, Sheikh Mohammed has himself been in the shadows, in particular since a high court ruled in 2020 that, in all probability, he had orchestrated the kidnap and detainment of two of his own daughters.
The awkwardness of his potential presence at Epsom for the Derby this month had racing tying itself in knots over the shadow a winner might cast over an event that formed an official part of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
More than any other, it is Sheikh Mohammed who keeps the sport’s lights on and, as one prominent pundit put it last year, such is the extent to which racing relies on Godolphin’s presence for everything from employment to driving yearling sales markets, that were he to be exiled, Newmarket would soon become a ghost town.
At Centurion Club last week, the newest wave of Middle Eastern investors began to make themselves at home. Royal Ascot will this week serve a reminder that, at an event that is a British institution, they have long been part of the establishment.
