Portcullis has royal breeders dreaming

Captain Cook was a few months from landfall after his first circumnavigation of the earth when the first Craven meeting was held on Newmarket heath in the spring of 1771.

- Greg Wood

It is older than any of the Classics, and old enough too to have the great Potoooooooo - who got his name when a stable lad was unsure how to spell potatoes - on the Craven Stakes's roll of honour in 1782. For 250 years, the first meeting of the year on the Rowley Mile at Newmarket has been Flat racing's first rite of spring.

"It’s what keeps everybody going,” Jason Singh, the marketing director of the famous bloodstock auction house Tattersalls, said here yesterday, “and I speak as a breeder and racehorse owner myself as well as a sales company employee.

“Every year, at this time, everybody has hopes that the next horse they’ve bought is going to be the next superstar, and until it’s not, it could be. In racing, you’ve got to be an optimist. If you were a realist, you wouldn’t own a horse, so it’s full of people who are optimistic about the season, and the start of the Flat season is exactly that, everybody is full of hopes and dreams, until they’re not.”