For one year only at Royal Ascot racing won against the hats, the booze, the crush and the posing – Telegraph.co.uk

The Royal was plainly missing and the Ascot was sometimes hard to detect as well, with the racing good, the big names familiar but no crowd energy to propel Flat racings grandest meeting.

For one year only - we assume - the racing won against the hats, the booze, the crush, the posing and the paparazzi, the social climbing and the betting ring din. Boiled down, this years Royal Ascot is pure racing, stripped of the human element: the fizzing gallery that horses and jockeys thunder towards at a meeting that underpins the English social calendar.

The horses won against the traffic, the fashion, the morning rush to be ready, the afternoon clamour to be seen. At the heart of day one was action that might have been anywhere in England, on any racecourse. When the stalls opened the heart beat faster. Each time they crossed the line, a 35-minute void ensued.

Football will not face this problem. The game rolls on for 45 minutes, stops and then starts again. The theatre of racing is stop-start. The first race lasted 1m 26.19secs. The next one arrived more than half an hour later. Into that gap are usually squeezed snapshots of the English at play. As the Bollinger and the beer kick in, the early garden party feel inches towards the kind of hedonism that requires a lot of clearing up.

But Ascot did all it could to bring punters into the biosphere of the Queens course, with a new wine club, afternoon tea by home delivery, a Royal Ascot songbook and an online Racing Hub through which owners could watch their money either paying dividends or going up in smoke. No outfits, no top hats, just the people who pay the bills stuck at home on sofas, occasionally chatting to ITV Racing, for whom Mick Fitzgerald was penned in his own wooden enclosure in the parade ring.

This was about as far from the essence of Royal Ascot as you could go. But it was infinitely better than nothing - and a day for purists to savour. The old debate about how best to promote racing was irrelevant. This week it is all about the horses, the professionals, with 3.7m in prize-money fought over with all the hullabaloo of a Monday morning on the Newmarket gallops.

Theyve done so well to have the meeting. It is still Royal Ascot, said Richard Hannon, trainer of the weeks first winner, Motakhayyel. There arent 60,000 people here, but maybe there are more people at home watching and paying attention than there ever have been. Its fantastic, in what has been a very gloomy few months. It looks like sport is coming back, in the right way, racing is adapting and were showing that we can adapt to new regulations and so on.

John Gosden, the countrys leading trainer, was even more effusive. He said: This country and many countries in the world have suffered horribly from this sinister disease; it has been devastating. Everything that people are going through, let alone the destruction of our economies and people losing jobs. Its a worldwide problem.

So, to be able to come here in this very large amphitheatre in the fresh air, biosecurity everythings very tightly run, we are cleaning our hands all the time. It is a very safe place to be and its lovely to put on top-quality sport with the best racehorses in Europe, great athletes and great jockeys. We understand that its a financial blow for the racecourses, but we are putting a show on and its great that its going out.

That show went out to 120 countries, all of whom had cause to reflect on what sport is, and how it really functions, not to mention the English class system, which boards a carriage and trots down the straight before this meeting starts. Or did. That standard TV news shot of the durability of the monarchy was lost to the nation. But the racing survived, and the good news is that its still beautiful.

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For one year only at Royal Ascot racing won against the hats, the booze, the crush and the posing - Telegraph.co.uk