Royal Meeting Day 1

Today we have the start of Royal Ascot and the feature meeting is supported by 3 other flat meetings at Thirsk Beverley and Brighton and a jumps meeting at Stratford.  In Ireland there is a flat meeting at Sligo.  The stable does not have any runners and David will not be in attendance at the Royal meeting but we shall certainly be following the action this afternoon.  It will still be a bit of a strange atmosphere for such a big meeting I am sure as even though there will be 12,000 people in attendance I imagine the big stands at Royal Ascot will still look fairly empty.  It is great some crowd are able to go though and fingers crossed we are working to more normal times definitely next year but hopefully sooner.  Frankie Dettori is obviously always a jockey to follow at the big meetings and he is the leading winning jockey for the Royal meeting amongst jockeys currently riding.  He has ridden 73 Royal winners which is 11 more than nearest rival Ryan Moore who has ridden 62.  I was interested to read that he has in fact only had 59 rides this year in total yet he always seems to be riding and having big winners!  He is obviously just saving himself for the big days.

 Frankie actually has six rides today at Royal Ascot and you would not bet against him having a few winners.  Apparently Palace Pier who runs in the Queen Anne Stakes at 2.30pm today is his best bet of the week and anything but a win would probably be disappointing.  His other rides are Tolstoy, Extravagent Kid, Thunder Moon, Golden Rules and Forest of Dean and you probably could do worse than following his rides.  I see that Willie Mullins has two favourites today and has a very good chance of taking a Royal Ascot winner back to Ireland.  He has the first two in the betting in the Ascot Stakes with M C Muldoon partnered by Ryan Moore holding favouritism.

At Stratford there are quite a few runners on the card and the races look competitive, none of our jockeys are in action but the racing gets underway at 1.20pm.

There are a couple of sombre Scots in work this morning and there is no talking about Scotland and the football!  Both our travelling head lads Bob Hodge and Craig Wylie are passionate Scots men and it was not a good start to the Euro 2020 tournament yesterday for them as they lost 2-0 to the Czech Republic.  Poland beat Slovakia while I have no idea how Spain failed to score and not beat Sweden in a game that ended 0-0.  Today there are just two matches as we complete the first set of games in the tournament.  Hungary play Portugal at 5pm while there is a tasty looking game at 8pm where France take on Germany.

A man walked in to a bar with a piece of tarmac under his arm.  He said "I'll have a beer please and one for the road!"  Have a good day.