A right royal Derby day

Seventy years after Elizabeth II so nearly had a coronation Derby winner, Jack Watkins looks at royal connections with the great race

- Jack Watkins

THE Derby may not always live up to its billing as the premier Flat racing classic, but the 1953 iteration certainly did. A memorable day on the Epsom Downs almost provided a winner for the newly crowned Elizabeth II with Aureole, only four days after the coronation.

The young Queen’s chief racing enthusiasm was for the Flat (unlike the Queen Mother, who largely owned steeplechasers) and her special interest lay in Thoroughbred bloodlines; she wanted to breed a Derby winner. Aureole, however, was bred by her father, George VI, by the 1933 Derby winner Hyperion, and she’d inherited the colt on his death in 1952. Aureole raced only twice as a two year old and began his three-year-old campaign with an encouraging fifth in the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket. When he followed up with a win in the Lingfield Derby Trial, he was, for a time, ante-post favourite for the big race.

However, Aureole had a flighty temperament. As the Queen stood in the paddock beside the towering figure of the royal trainer Cecil Boyd-Rochfort on that hot, sunny day in early June, the flashy chestnut with a long white blaze was displaying signs of agitation. By the time the flag went up, he’d drifted to 9-1 in the betting, third in the market behind the 5-1 joint-favourites Pinza and Premonition.