Powerful Glory at 200-1 leads shocks to electrify Ascot on Champions Day
Calandagan became only the second horse ever to win the King George and Champion Stakes in the same season at Ascot, matching the achievement of the great Brigadier Gerard in 1972, but it was a very different moment of racing history that may stick longest in the memories of many racegoers at the track.When Qirat set a record for the longest-priced victory in a British Group One race with a 150-1 success in the Sussex Stakes in August, it seemed likely to remain unmatched for years if not decades, but instead his tenure as elite British racing’s unlikeliest winner lasted only until mid-October and Powerful Glory’s 200-1 win in the Champions Sprint.It was the most astonishing result on a day that also saw a 100-1 success for Cicero’s Gift in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, and unlike Qirat’s front-running success at Goodwood, where an apparent pacemaker was ignored until it was too late, Powerful Glory came late with a perfectly timed challenge under Jamie Spencer.The noise from the crowd had been building to a climax as Lazzat, the 2-1 favourite, hit the front inside the final furlong.After Spencer had edged out Lazzat by a neck, however, there was only the rustling of racecards as punters checked the winner’s identity and searched for anything in Powerful Glory’s form that might have hinted at such an unexpected success.
Richard Fahey’s colt had beaten only one rival in two starts earlier in the season, finishing eighth of nine on his three-year-old debut, admittedly in a Group Two contest, before trailing in last of five in a conditions race at Beverley in September.But he was unbeaten in two starts as a juvenile and Fahey insisted afterwards that, shocking though it was for the punters, Saturday’s race had been “the plan all year, genuinely”.Fahey added that his colt “genuinely had excuses for his two starts this year and we’ve seen the real Powerful Glory today”.While Spencer said afterwards that he had been reminded of his 80-1 success on Khaadem in the Jubilee Stakes here in June 2023 as he studied the form on Saturday morning.“I thought when I saw the horse was 80-1 this morning, well, Khaadem was 80-1, so you never know,” Spencer said.
“But not in your wildest dreams are you expecting to win after finishing last in a five-runner conditions race.“Powerful Glory is a good horse and travelled nicely.I thought I was going to be placed, and all of a sudden I thought: ‘I actually have a chance’.It is a different set of emotions as the race progressed, I am just glad that it worked out.”Powerful Glory did not go entirely unbacked and Ladbrokes reported taking 400 bets on the winner either online or in betting shops, including a £50 each-way stake that returned £12,000.
But his win set the tone for an unprecedented afternoon which saw two Group One winners at a three-figure starting price, as Charlie Hills’s Cicero’s Gift registered a similarly shocking success in the QEII.“I am speechless,” Hills, who lost his father, the legendary trainer Barry, in June, said afterwards.“It has been a really tough year for us at home, but we are a tight family and we’ve stuck strong.The old man would be looking down and would be so chuffed,.”Given all that had gone before, it is a wonder that anyone had any betting cash left as the field went to post for the Champion Stakes, the last of the day’s five Group One events, but punters who went in again on Calandagan, the 15-8 second-favourite, were rewarded with a decisive defeat of Ombudsman, the 13-8 favourite.
Sign up to Sport in FocusSign up to Sport in Focusafter newsletter promotionThe win set the seal on an immense season for Francis-Henri Graffard, Calandagan’s trainer, who took the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe with Daryz two weeks ago and has long since been assured of victory in the French trainers’ championship for the first time.Kempton: 1.46 Graecia 2.16 Obsessedwithyou 2.46 One Horse Town 3.
16 Bourbali (nap) 3,50 Burdett Road 4,25 Safe Destination (nb) 5,00 Him Malaya,Sedgefield: 2.
00 Tree Top Tyson 2.30 Couldbeaweapon 3.00 Scarlet Moon 3.33 Ballylinch 4.06 Bumpy Evans 4.
41 Park Annonciade 5.15 Blue Topaz.“He’s a fantastic horse, his work coming into this race was incredible and he loves this track,” Graffard said.“Mickaël [Barzalona, his jockey] knows him very well and when he got him into stride in the straight, he was so good to watch.Ombudsman was trying to challenge him but he couldn’t get past my very good horse.
“Last year [when Calandagan finished a half-length second] we were on the inner course, he had an inside draw and it was very tactical and everything went against us.I was very upset with myself and the instructions I gave the jockey last year, but we know him well now and he’s shown there he is a fantastic horse.“I was very stressed before the race as I was unsure what the tactics should be, but it worked out well and it’s easy when you have a champion.”
French customs reject British shellfish shipments after UK ‘reset’ deal with EU
One of Britain’s largest mussel exporters has suffered a £150,000 loss, after three of its shipments to the EU were rejected in recent weeks by French customs.Family-run business Offshore Shellfish, based in Devon, has continued exporting blue mussels to its European customers since Brexit, despite the administrative burden and onerous paperwork requirements.However, the past month has seen three out of four lorries prevented from entering the EU by customs officials at the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer for various reasons, which the company’s commercial director Sarah Holmyard called “subjective and inconsistent”.“We have sent hundreds and hundreds of loads since Brexit. We’ve never had a single one rejected,” Holmyard told the Guardian
If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit … look away now
If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit you can no longer join our Club or pick up a Penguin, as the lunchbox favourites have reduced the amount of cocoa in their recipe so much they are now only “chocolate flavour”.The two snacks, both made by McVitie’s, changed their recipes earlier this year amid soaring cocoa prices – which have prompted manufacturers to try a number of different tactics to keep prices down.Club and Penguin can no longer be described as chocolate biscuits as they contain more palm oil and shea oil than cocoa, as first reported by the trade journal The Grocer.“We made some changes to McVitie’s Penguin and Club earlier this year, where we are using a chocolate flavour coating with cocoa mass, rather than a chocolate coating. Sensory testing with consumers shows the new coatings deliver the same great taste as the originals,” the McVitie’s owner, Pladis, said in a statement
The platform exposing exactly how much copyrighted art is used by AI tools
Ask Google’s AI video tool to create a film of a time-travelling doctor who flies around in a blue British phone booth and the result, unsurprisingly, resembles Doctor Who.And if you ask OpenAI’s technology to do the same, a similar thing happens. What’s wrong with that, you may think?The answer could be one of the biggest issues AI chiefs face as their era-defining technology becomes ever more ubiquitous in our lives.Google and OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence is supposed to be just that – generative, meaning it develops novel answers to our questions. Ask it for a time-travelling doctor, you get one that their systems have created
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?
From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states
Verstappen takes F1 US GP pole after sprint victory to turn up heat on Norris and Piastri
Max Verstappen claimed pole position for the US Grand Prix with an immense lap for Red Bull at the Circuit of the Americas. However the day was marked by yet another incident between the two world championship contenders Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, with the latter crashing into Norris on the opening lap of the sprint race taking them both out and leaving McLaren with a headache as to how they manage their drivers.Verstappen had been all but untouchable throughout qualifying, his lead over Norris in second place was a full three-tenths, an age on this track. However in what is an increasingly tense title fight Piastri’s difficult weekend continued as he managed only sixth on the grid. Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton took third and fifth for Ferrari, with Mercedes’ George Russell in fourth
‘Those final few hours were brutal’: British duo end epic journey in Australia after rowing across Pacific Ocean
One more day. One more day up and down the pitiless slide. One more day of blistered hands gripping unforgiving oars.But after more than 8,000 nautical miles (15,000km) at sea – an epic five-and-a-half-month journey across the Pacific that included close encounters with whales, failing beacons and chocolate shortages – the sea had one more challenge.A gusting 20-knot wind off Cairns kept pushing Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne’s tiny rowboat, the Velocity, from the terra firma that was now achingly close
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