Category: FAQ

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has enjoyed a lifelong passion for horse racing. Indeed, between her coronation in 1953 and 2020, when she was forced to stay at home because of Covid-19 restrictions, the Queen never missed a day of Royal Ascot.

Her officially registered racing colours consist of a purple jacket with gold braid, red sleeves and a black velvet cap with a gold fringe, as previously used by her great grandfather King Edward VII and, before that, by the later King George IV during his years as Prince Regent. Racing colours are currently supplied to the Queen by Newmarket-based Gibson Saddlers, which was granted a Royal Warrant of Appointment by Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 1932.

All told, the Queen has seen the famous Royal silks carried to victory at Royal Ascot on 24 separate occasions. The first was in 1953, when Choir Boy won the Royal Hunt Cup, but arguably the most memorable came in 2013, when Estimate won the historic Gold Cup. John Warren, Bloodstock and Racing Advisor to the Queen, later wrote, ‘No reigning monarch had won the Gold Cup and it gave Her Majesty great pleasure in achieving an ambition to breed such a great horse of true stamina and grit.’

‘Dutch betting’, or ‘Dutching’ for short, is a betting technique that involves backing multiple selections in the same race. Legend has it the idea was developed by infamous New York gangster Arthur Flegenheimer, a.k.a. ‘Dutch Schultz’, hence the name. In any case, the aim of dutching is make the same profit regardless of which selection wins, assuming that one does. Of course, it’s possible that all selections lose, in which case all stakes are lost.

Fairly obviously, if the odds on each selection are the same, say, 2/1 twice, the stake is split equally between them. If not, say, one selection at 1/1 and another at 3/1, the stake is split proportionally, with the shorter-priced selection carrying three-quarters of the total amount and the longer-priced selection just one-quarter. Backing two horses in a race increases the chances of winning, but splitting the stake between the selections produces ‘coupled’ odds, which are greatly reduced. In the above example, if we stake one point each on our two 2/1 selections and one of them wins the total return is three points. In other words, we’ve staked two points to win three, at collective odds of 1/2.

In horse racing circles, the term ‘black type’ is used to describe the way in which the name of a horse, or the names of horses in its family, is printed in a thoroughbred auction catalogue. An auction catalogue page is essentially an advertisement for a horse offered for sale, but space on the page is limited. Thus, to accentuate the positive aspects of the pedigree, any horse that has won a Listed or Pattern race has its name printed in uppercase, bold-faced letters. By the same token, any horse that has been placed in a Listed or Pattern race has its name printed in upper- and lowercase, bold-faced letters. Thus, potential buyers can see, at a glance, the accomplishments of a horse and its immediate family.

The term ‘black type’ has also slipped into horse racing parlance in the adjectival sense, such that offspring might be described, say, as out of black-type dams or siblings to black-type horses. Again, this simply means that the horses in question won a Listed or Pattern race or were, at least, placed in such a race. Note that black type does not, in itself, differentiate between Group 1, Group 2, Group 3 and Listed races; further descriptors are required to indicate the level, or quality, of the race in question.

The term ‘steeplechase’ was coined in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century to describe an early form of point-to-point racing, in which the ‘course’ – which was, in fact, open countryside – started and finished at a church steeple. In fact, the first recorded race of this type was held in County Cork, Ireland in 1752. More recently, on enclosed racecourses, the original, natural obstacles were replaced with artificial fences and ditches, but the name endured. Nowadays, steeplechases are run over advertised distances between two miles and four miles and two-and-a-half furlongs.

With the exception of specialist, bank courses, such as the Cross Country Course at Cheltenham, steeplechasers jump three types of obstacle, namely the plain fence, the open ditch and, optionally, the water jump. The plain fence consists of a rigid frame filled with real or artificial birch and must stand at least 4’6″ high. The open ditch is simply a plain fence preceded by a shallow ditch, to create a wider, more challenging obstacle. The water jump, where present, must stand at least 3′ high, with an area of water at least 9′ wide and 3″ deep beyond the fence. Steeplechases must have at least twelve fences in the first two miles and at least six fences in each subsequent mile. One fence in each mile must be an open ditch.