Run annually over a mile and a half at Ascot in July and open to horses aged three years and upwards, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes has the distinction of being the most prestigious, and valuable, all-aged Flat race in Britain. Indeed, with guaranteed prize money of £1.2 million, it is the second most valuable Flat race, of any description, behind only the Derby.
Established, as the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Festival of Britain Stakes, in 1951, the race has been one by some of the truly great middle-distance performers of the modern era, including Nijinsky, Mill Reef, Brigadier Gerard, Shergar, Dancing Brave, Reference Point and Harbinger. Two of that illustrious septet, Shergar, in 1981, and Harbinger, in 2010, were saddled by Sir Michael Stoute who, with six wins, is the most successful trainer in the history of the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
Fresh from facile victories in the Derby at Epsom and the Irish Derby at the Curragh, Shergar was equally untroubled to land odds of 2/5 at Ascot, drawing clear in the closing stages under Walter Swinburn to beat fellow three-year-old Madam Gay by four lengths. After a 12-year hiatus, Stoute won his second King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes with the five-year-old colt Opera House, owned by Sheikh Mohammed, in 1993.
In 2002, Stoute produced Golan, who had won the 2,000 Guineas as a three-year-old, but had been absent since finishing unplaced in the Japan Cup the previous November, to win on his seasonal debut and, in 2009, saddled an unprecedented 1-2-3, courtesy of Conduit, Tartan Bearer and Ask. More recently, he has added to his winning tally with Harbinger, who won by an impressive 11 lengths in 2010, but sadly never raced again after fracturing a cannon bone on the gallops in Newmarket, and Poet’s Word who, in 2018, beat his marginally better-fancied stable companion Crystal Ocean by a neck, with the pair nine lengths clear, after what the ‘Racing Post’ described as a ‘stirring battle’.