THIS time last season we were in anticipation of another great race for the Eclipse Stakes. Six runners, five of them Group 1 winners and add in the beaten Derby favourite. And we got a brilliant race.

Today’s race is less exciting, seven runners, two Group 1 winners, but three from the same stable. And the star horse over the distance is missing.

It’s brought discussion by some pundits to question if the race needs moving in the summer calendar, because it comes, and always has come, quite close to Royal Ascot.

By contrast, the other Group 1 of the weekend, the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud has a pretty attractive field of eight older horses. Though its four recent renewals had small fields of eight, five, seven and five runners.

Of the last 15 runnings of the Prince Of Wales’s Stakes, five winners and one second-placed horse did line up in the Eclipse next time.

Last year’s Eclipse with a six-runner field, had the Prince of Wales’s winner, the French Derby winner, the Group 1 Prix Ganay and d’Ispahan winner and the beaten Derby favourite Delacroix. Ombudsman met defeat but most of the talk and analysis post-race was on the ride the favourite had been given, if William Buick hitting the front too soon had compromised Ombudsman’s chance.

John Gosden saying: “I said beforehand it could be a messy race and I think I was correct. We thought Delacroix would go forward and the French horse (Sosie) would sit handy and then of course it was all the other way round, but that happens in small fields. It didn’t turn out the way we thought.”

The proximity of Royal Ascot was not the main reason offered for defeat. Perhaps it’s just a trainer preference around the Eclipse as the Gosdens didn’t run 2023 Ascot winner Mostahdaf again until York.

The decline of the King George

So if the Eclipse is diminishing, what of that other former great race of the summer – the next clash of the generations in the King George and Queen Elizabeth Stakes?

Six other Prince Of Wales’s Stakes winners skipped the Eclipse and stepped up to the mile and a half King George – a distance they were probably better suited to. 2011 Rewilding, 2017 Highland Reel, 2018 Poet’s Word, 2019 Crystal Ocean, 2021 Love and 2024 Auguste Rodin. A new Eclipse date would likely affect the mile-and-a-half race hugely.

The King George has decreased in excitement and participation more than the Eclipse over recent years, though its end of July date should be suitable for three-year-old middle-distance colts and those coming from Royal Ascot.

Four of the last six runnings featured small fields - Enable beat two in 2020, Adayar was one of five runners in 2021, Pyledriver faced five rivals in 2022 and Calandagan’s win was in a field of five in 2025.

To move or not to move?

If we did move the Eclipse back two weeks, what would become of the King George? The older horses simply are not there. No more old ‘typical Sir Michael Stoute-trained older horse’ that made the seasons in the 80s and 90s.

The 1997 Eclipse had only five horses, Pilsudski beating Benny The Dip and Bosra Sham. Ten years later, Authorized lined up in a field of eight. Among the week’s discussions, Kevin Blake’s ATR blog argued: “The fact that we have had so many wonderful renewals of the race over the last couple of decades has masked this issue.” Would a move really deliver a ‘consistently bigger, stronger field’, or cause more issues for other races? Or do the ‘wonderful renewals’ prove that there is no issue and a rush to react often creates other problems?

Golden Horn won the Qipco Irish Champion Stakes for trainer John Gosden.

MANY post race comments by trainers and riders have raised a bit of heat in recent weeks.

It’s easy to pile on to comments made in the heat of the moment, with jockeys and trainers bearing the honesty of a defeat. We should first appreciate the accessibility of the main competitors, both winners and losers, compared to so many other sports.

John Gosden has been pretty good for comment and was taken to task for his comments to a question from Rishi Persad after winning the Prince of Wales’s Stakes with Ombudsman replying, “He is too good to go a mile and a half!”

Suggested wording

Perhaps as some suggested, he meant to say “fast” not “good”. Or he probably should have thought twice and thrown the question back at the interviewer, saying something more like, “so why would I do that?”

“This horse has a phenomenal turn of foot and great acceleration for a mile-and-a-quarter horse”, was his comment.

All that said, Gosden did avoid one of the top mile and a quarter races last year in choosing not to come to Leopardstown for the Irish Champions Stakes. Ombudsman would not ‘appreciate running against multiple entries from one stable on a track with a short straight’, were the comments then.

It was interesting therefore to see the horse and his pacemaker entered in the Leopardstown contest again. Might he be braver this year? Let’s live in hope, even if there are 21 Aidan O’Brien-trained entries!

A pretty picture of Gold Cup winner A Plus Tard and Emily Kate Robinson who won the Dublin side-saddle qualifier at Charleville Show last Sunday \ Susan Finnerty