Champions Day – and Balding v O’Brien – can give Flat season a fitting finale

With five Group Ones, a £250,000 juvenile race and a decent racing surface (if the weather forecast is correct), the schedule for Champions Day at Ascot on Saturday looks like the fitting finale to the British Flat season that its architects envisaged 15 years ago. Add in the bonus of a live contest for the UK Flat trainers’ championship and this is a card that promises twists and turns from the first race to the last.

Less than a month ago, Andrew Balding was a double-figure price to win the title for the first time, while Aidan O’Brien was effectively “no offers” to win for the third year running, and ninth time in all. He starts the week as a 6-4 shot with Paddy Power, while O’Brien is 1-2 – and it is a measure of the extent to which the two trainers have dominated the campaign that even before Champions Day, both have already surpassed John Gosden’s record prize-money total of £8.52m in 2017.

Unless the wheels suddenly fall off completely, Balding and O’Brien are highly likely to be the first trainers to reach £9m in prize money in a calendar year in Britain – and yet one of them will still finish second. As William Haggas, currently third in the table, pointed out during a Champions Day press call on Monday: “We’ve had a pretty good year and we’re £1m in front of Karl [Burke], but £3m behind Aidan and Andrew.”

There can be little doubt who the majority of fans at Ascot on Saturday will be rooting for. Balding inherited one of the most historic and well-appointed yards in the country when he took over the licence at Park House Stables from his father, Ian, in 2003, and has built on that legacy year-on-year to the point where it is a 250-horse string.

Yet he still feels very much like the underdog up against the might of O’Brien’s operation and will be only the fifth trainer to win a first title outright this century – O’Brien, in 2001, was the first – if he can maintain his lead until the end of the year.

Balding will be significantly outnumbered in terms of runners this weekend, too. He has just four remaining entries that are likely to go to post after the five-day stage on Monday, while O’Brien has 15 possible runners with a grand total of 20 entries, and so plenty of options when it comes to playing his hand.

There is no final decision as yet, for instance, on whether Gstaad, the Irish 2,000 Guineas winner, will head for the £1.1m Queen Elizabeth II Stakes over a mile, or step up two furlongs for the Champion Stakes, the day’s £1.3m feature event. Wherever that one goes, Constitution River, the brilliant winner of the Eclipse Stakes in July, is likely to head in the opposite direction, and both will set off as leading fancies.

Neither, though, is a sure-fire favourite for their chosen assignment. Charlie Appleby’s fast-improving Talk Of New York, a supplementary entry on Monday, heads the market for the QEII, while Calandagan, last year’s winner, and John Gosden’s Ombudsman, the Prince of Wales’s Stakes winner at Royal Ascot, are vying for favouritism in the Champion.

The two title rivals have a Group One favourite apiece elsewhere on the card, as Kalpana, Balding’s King George winner earlier in the campaign, will bid to win the Fillies’ & Mares’ Stakes for the third year running, while Scandinavia, who was O’Brien’s 100th Royal Ascot winner in the Gold Cup in June, is around 2-1 for the Long Distance Cup.

Even so, O’Brien – and the punters too, for that matter - will be taking very little for granted on Saturday. Last year’s meeting left the backers baffled and impoverished by winners at 200-1 and 100-1 in the Sprint and QEII respectively. O’Brien, meanwhile, has not saddled a Group One winner on Champions Day since Magical won the Champion Stakes in October 2019.

That is a grand total of 25 Champions Day Group Ones without a winner from Ballydoyle, which is a surprising statistic, to say the least.

Scandinavia, meanwhile, was beaten at long odds-on on his most recent start at Longchamp on Arc weekend, and there has been a nagging sense in recent weeks that O’Brien’s string is a little short of its usual dominant form. That impression is backed up by Timeform’s current “Run To Form” rating for O’Brien of 61.7% which, while thoroughly respectable, is still some way short of the 70%+ level of several recent seasons.

Of course, O’Brien could easily reel off a Group One treble on Saturday and put the championship race to bed. Balding, though, has been in irresistible form since high summer, and may never have a better chance to bring the title back to Kingsclere for the first time since 1971. The timing, the weather and the ground often conspire against Champions Day as a showpiece event, but this year’s card could well redress the balance.