By Sam Turner -
With 38 Royal Ascot winners featuring proudly on his resume, Saeed bin Suroor looks forward to the marquee summer meeting more than most.
Recent victories for Real World in the 2021 Royal Hunt Cup and Dubai Future in the 2022 Wolferton Stakes prove that Godolphin’s legendary trainer can still compete on the biggest of global stages.
Following a strangely barren Dubai season, Bin Suroor has hit the ground running back in the UK courtesy of four turf victories, two of which have been provided by the improving Wild Tiger who bids to emulate Real World’s heroics in the 1600m Royal Hunt Cup.
The application of the cheekpieces have worked the oracle for the son of Frankel who followed up a comeback Yarmouth success with a comprehensive Goodwood triumph over 1400m.
“I enjoyed Real World winning the Hunt Cup. Then he went on and won a Listed, a Group Three and a Group Two. It meant a lot,” recalls Bin Suroor, who currently sits fourth among current trainers for winners saddled at the royal meeting.
“Wild Tiger is doing well and improved from his win at Yarmouth. He’s won two already this season and a mile will be fine for him so we'll take him to the Royal Hunt Cup.
“It is much harder trying to win 30-runner handicaps than the Group Ones, though!”
The four time Royal Ascot champion trainer will also saddle the exciting Summer Of Love who made a sparkling return to action in a Kempton novice event over 1400m earlier this month.
He continued: “I’m looking forward to running Summer Of Love. She won recently at Kempton and she’d only worked four times, she wasn’t ready. She should run in the Buckingham Palace.
“HE WAS A CLASS HORSE”
It is perhaps easy to forget the influence Bin Suroor once had at Ascot every June as his lengthy list of winners at the royal meeting reads like a who’s who of equine greats with Dubai Millennium unsurprisingly top of the tree.
“The thing to remember about Ascot is it is the best quality horse racing in the world, it is the biggest meeting. People come from all over the world for it to see the best horses,” he adds.
“Dubai Millennium sticks out. He was a Dubai World Cup winner but to see him win the Prince of Wales’s like that was good, he was a class horse and produced the best stallion in the world in Dubawi.
“It’s nice to look back at days like that sometimes, you realise you have done something special.
“I like the stayers. Five times I won the Gold Cup. To win it, you have to have lots of stamina and lots of class, that’s why certain horses could win it more than once.
“It’s hard to win any race at Royal Ascot but the Gold Cup is very hard to win. It’s a special race and the memories will live with me for a long time. We were lucky we had those horses.”
Three decades of winning the biggest races at the world’s greatest flat meeting suggests luck arguably had little to do with Bin Suroor’s longstanding success.
