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It began as a gesture of sympathy.

In 1861, Prince Albert died, and Queen Victoria withdrew from public life to grieve for her husband. Her son, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, stepped into the breach, taking on the ceremonial duties his mother could no longer face. A year later, in 1862, a new race at Royal Ascot was named in his honour.

That race is still run today, for a seven-figure prize fund, and it draws the finest middle-distance horses in the world.

From Three-Year-Olds to the World’s Best

The original Prince of Wales’s Stakes bore little resemblance to the race we watch now. Run over one mile and five furlongs, it was open to three-year-olds, and its first winner, a horse called Carisbrook, is now little more than a footnote. The race had an aristocratic bearing that suited its origins, but it was a long way from the spectacle it would become.

That long, unbroken run stopped abruptly in 1939. The Second World War forced the cancellation of Royal Ascot altogether, and when racing resumed, the Prince of Wales’s Stakes did not come back with it. There was, after all, no Prince of Wales. The title sat vacant, and the race quietly slipped off the calendar.

Its revival, in 1968, had an almost theatrical quality. A year before the investiture of Prince Charles at Caernarfon Castle, the race returned, and fittingly, the first winner of the reborn contest was a horse called Royal Palace. Pitch that to a screenwriter, and you would call it too neat. The race came back in a new form too: one mile and two furlongs, restricted to horses aged four and older, the shape it keeps to this day.

The Group 1 Era Begins With a Masterpiece

It was not until 2000 that the race was elevated to Group 1, the sport’s highest classification, and, at the same stroke, became the richest race of the entire Royal Meeting.

The timing produced one of racing’s great coincidences: the very first Group 1 running was won by Dubai Millennium.

It is hard, at this distance, to convey what Dubai Millennium meant. Trained by Saeed bin Suroor for Godolphin, he had won the Dubai World Cup earlier that year with devastating authority, and he came to Ascot on the short list of horses who could genuinely be called the best in the world. He won, and was pulled up not long afterwards with a tendon injury that ended his career. What he left behind was the memory of something close to perfection, compressed into a handful of races.

By any measure, he was the ideal horse to open a race’s new era.

The Race Goes Global

The promotion to Group 1 did more than raise the prize money. It changed who came. Where the race had once been a fixture on the British domestic calendar, it became a target for the world’s best training operations. Godolphin had announced that shift emphatically with Dubai Millennium, a horse bred in America, trained in Dubai, and campaigned worldwide. Others followed.

The Prince of Wales’s Stakes now draws runners from Ireland, France, Japan and the United States as a matter of course. Its place in the QIPCO British Champions Series gives it weight beyond the result itself, with a “Win and You’re In” qualification for the Breeders’ Cup Turf in America. A victory at Ascot in June can shape a horse’s entire year, pointing connections towards one of the sport’s richest autumn prizes.

A race that began as a Victorian domestic honour now sits among the international fixtures that define a middle-distance horse’s career.

What the Race Demands

Run over one mile and two furlongs on Ascot’s right-handed circuit, the Prince of Wales’s Stakes leaves nowhere to hide. The field breaks from the stalls on the western part of the course, sweeps through two bends, then meets the famous home straight, that long, slightly rising stretch where the crowd gathers at the rails, and the truth of a race tends to come out.

It is a distance that rewards genuine class. A mile and a quarter is far enough to expose a horse without the stamina to sustain its effort, and short enough to punish one that lacks pure speed. The best horses in the world tend to be found in that narrow band between the two. This race finds them.

A Race That Grew Into Its Name

Few races can claim a history as strange in shape as this one. A Victorian tribute, suspended by war, lost for a quarter of a century, revived in circumstances that felt almost staged, then lifted to the very top of the sport. The Prince of Wales’s Stakes has been remade more than once, and each remaking has left it stronger.

The prize fund tells you what the sport thinks of it. The names on the roll of honour tell you the reputation has been earned.

Three Races Worth Remembering

Dubai Millennium, 2000. Trained by Saeed bin Suroor for Godolphin, Dubai Millennium came to Ascot having already won the Dubai World Cup by six lengths, in a display that left the racing world reaching for superlatives. His win in the inaugural Group 1 running felt almost inevitable: he travelled powerfully, quickened decisively, and won with the authority only a top-class horse carries. A tendon injury soon afterwards ended his career, leaving a record of brilliance packed into too few races, and the lasting question of just how good he might have become.

Love, 2021. A daughter of Galileo, Love had swept the fillies’ Classics in 2020 with performances that drew comparison to the great mares of earlier generations. By the time she reached Royal Ascot the following year, the question was not whether she was exceptional but whether she could carry that brilliance against the older colts. Ridden by Ryan Moore with the quiet confidence of a jockey who knew exactly what he was sitting on, she answered it in the manner of a horse for whom the result was never seriously in doubt. Class, as ever, told.

Ouija Board, 2006. Trained by Ed Dunlop and owned by Lord Derby, Ouija Board was already a phenomenon before she reached Ascot. As a three-year-old she had won the Epsom Oaks, the Irish Oaks and the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf. At four she added the Hong Kong Vase. By the time she lined up here she was five, hardened by campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic and carrying enormous expectation. She won anyway. Ridden by Olivier Peslier, she travelled smoothly, asserted in the straight, and won with authority. Later that year she claimed a second Breeders’ Cup. She remains one of the great British thoroughbreds of the modern era.

The Ascot Chronicles continues with the Gold Cup, Royal Ascot’s oldest race, its most emotional, and the one that divides opinion like no other. Is the staying test the purest form of the sport, or a relic of another age? Thursday is Royal Ascot’s Ladies Day, and yet the day belongs to the stayers, and to the horse with the heart to see out two and a half miles of Ascot turf when every sinew is telling it to stop.