Ryan Moore, 39, is the son of West Sussex trainer Gary Moore and has clearly come a long way since riding his first winner, Mersey Beat, trained by his father in an amateur riders’ handicap hurdle at now-closed Towcester on May 15, 2000. Champion apprentice in 2003 and champion jockey, for the first time, in 2006, when still with Richard Hannon Snr., Moore would probably have defended his jockeys’ title in 2007, but for a broken wrist, and set the record straight by winning it again in 2008 and 2009, having become stable jockey to Sir Michael Stoute.
Of course, since April, 2015, Moore has been first-choice jockey at Ballydoyle in Co. Tipperary, which has done his career no harm, but he had enjoyed remarkable success at Royal Ascot even before that prime appointment. In fact, he was the leading rider at the Royal meeting for the first time in 2010, with four winners, and has since won the award nine more times, including back-to-back victories in 2022 and 2023, for a total of ten wins altogether. All told, Moore has ridden 79 winners at the June showpiece, placing him third on the all-time list, behind only the late Lester Piggott and the soon-to-be-retired Lanfranco ‘Frankie’ Dettori.
Even by his own, masterful standards, Moore enjoyed a true annus mirabilis in 2015, when he steered home no fewer than nine winners at Royal Ascot, including the dual Guineas winner, Gleneagles, in the Group 1 St. James’s Palace Stakes on the opening day. Other Pattern-level highlights of the week included Acapulco, trained at the time by Wesley Ward, in the Group 2 Queen Mary Stakes, Waterloo Bridge, trained, like Gleneagles, by Aidan O’Brien, in the Group 2 Norfolk Stakes and Curvy, trained by David Wachman, in the Group 2 Ribblesdale Stakes.