Royal Ascot 2010: Coronation Stakes Preview

CORONATION STAKES – ROYAL ASCOT 18TH JUNE 2010

While the European 2000 Guineas winners fight it out in the St James’s Palace Stakes on the opening day of the meeting, the fillies have their scrap later in the week – on the Friday – to determine the best female miler in Europe.

The Coronation Stakes is also a Group 1 race that is run on the round course and, like the colts’ version, usually attracts runners that have been contesting the Guineas in England, France, Ireland and occasionally Germany.

With all of the last ten winners having contested at least one Guineas race it looks the obvious place to start.

Seven of those winners had run at Newmarket where they had finished: 1120561, two had run in France: 23 and three in Ireland: 115. Interestingly only one winner had run at both Newmarket and the Curragh.

Winners of the Newmarket 1000 Guineas finished: 5116981, Irish: 8101087, French: 4302834 and German: 102

The French version is by far the weakest of the four European Guineas as it has seen all eight winners to have tried in the last fifteen years, fail. That said, Banks Hill did win the Coronation Stakes in 2001 having been beaten into second place in the French 1000 Guineas. She ran in, and won, a race between her Longchamp and Ascot efforts and beat her French 1000 Guineas conqueror out of sight in the Coronation Stakes rematch.

We can’t really discard the French winner this year as she also won at Newmarket (albeit both races were won in the Stewards room) but we will concentrate solely on those fillies to have run in one of the four European Guineas races.

We are also looking for a horse that has won over 7f or 1m in their career.

This leaves us with fourteen of the 31 runners currently declared for the race.

From this group, we ought to look to those who had won at Group 3 level or above (the last ten winners all had) and, like ten of the last 11 winners, could boast a win in one of their last three runs.

We’ll consider Jacqueline Quest the ‘winner’ of the 1000 Guineas to give us nine remaining at this stage.

We’re left with nine for our shortlist and, with a few of them having alternative engagements, this looks tricky to play. However, the two I like most are: Music Show and Sent From Heaven