OKAY, so the weather wasn’t great and the ground was soft, but Qipco British Champions Day at Ascot last Saturday was still a success.

It had the right ingredients: top class racehorses. Enable was obviously missing and Ulysses was a 10th-hour scratching, and we were missing the five-furlong speedballs, Battaash and Marsha and Lady Aurelia, but we had the best six-furlong horses and the best milers and the best fillies (outside of Enable) and the best middle-distance horses (outside of Enable and Ulysses).