Who has trained the most winners at Royal Ascot?

royal ascotThe most successful trainer, numerically, in the history of Royal Ascot is Sir Michael Stoute who, in 2019, took his career total to 80 winners at the Royal Meeting. His latest victory came courtesy of Crystal Ocean, who accounted for world-class opposition, including Magical and Waldgeist – subsequent winners of the Irish Champion Stakes and Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, respectively – in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes.

Stoute, who hails from Barbados – in fact, was knighted for services to tourism in his native country in 1998 – had already won the Prince of Wales’s Stakes three times before, including with Poet’s Word in 2018. He began training, in his own right, in 1972 and saddled his first Royal Ascot winner, Etienne Gerard, in the Jersey Stakes five years later.

The veteran trainer, who turns 74 in October, 2019, won the last of his ten trainers’ titles in 2009 but, by his own admission, lacks the ‘firepower or the numbers’ to do so again. Nevertheless, Stoute remains as competitive as ever, granted the right ammunition – or, in his own words, ‘some class horses to go to war with’ – and his latest Royal Ascot winner, 42 years after his first, confirms that, at the Berkshire course at least, he remains a force to be reckoned with.