Last year’s race

• Winner: Rebel's Romance
• Jockey: William Buick
• Trainer: Charlie Appleby
• Owner: Godolphin
• Age: 7 Weight: 9st 3lbs
• Starting Price: 6/4
• Season Form Figures: 141
• Previous Best: 1st - Dubai Sheema Classic (Group 1), Meydan (March 2024)

By Paul Jones

The evergreen Rebel’s Romance is on target to try and emulate his victory in last season’s Group 2 contest. For a horse that has now won nine races at Grade 1 level all over the world (but not in Britain), he has a class edge, especially as Group/Grade 1 penalties were removed 13 years ago.

If Rebel’s Romance can join Assatis, Fruits Of Love and Maraahel as a back-to-back Hardwicke winner since 1990, he’ll break his own record of being the race’s oldest winner at the age of eight. Defoe ended the long sequence of winning four-year-olds that had stretched out to 11 runnings when he won in 2019. However, the 2022 and 2023 winners, Broome and Pyledriver, were aged six so were joining Jupiter Island in becoming the only winners over the age of five since 1905 until Rebel’s Romance trumped the lot of them last year.

Fanny Logan and Wonderful Tonight took back-to-back runnings in 2019 and 2020 for fillies. Before then we had to go back to Stanerra in 1983 to locate the previous successful filly/mare who was winning here just three days after also taking the Prince of Wales’s Stakes.

We can now no longer rely on blindly backing the Stoute horse in the Hardwicke following his retirement, which would have given punters as many as 11 payouts, but Aidan O’Brien and the Johnston stable weigh in with four wins apiece. Whereas O’Brien’s victories have been achieved in the last 17 years, Mark Johnston’s quartet of successes were some time ago now between 1999-2005 so Charlie has his work cut out.

The Group 1 penalty for the Hardwicke Stakes was dispensed with in 2013 since which Defoe, Wonderful Tonight, Broome and Pyldriver’s connections took full advantage. Defoe won the Coronation Cup on his previous start; Wonderful Tonight was winning on her seasonal debut after two soft-ground Group 1 wins in the autumn so the rain fell in time for her; Broome had won the previous season’s Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud and Pyledriver was triumphant on his first start since winning the previous season’s King George and Queen Elizabeth Stakes. Prior to that recent quartet, only Assatis in 1990 was a former Group 1 winner in over a quarter of a century.

The last winner to be breaking their duck at Group level here was Sandmason in 2001. As for Group 2 or Group 3 winners yet to win at the highest level, they have been responsible for 23 of the last 31 winners and 13 of the last 24 winners had won a Group race earlier in the season.

The Coronation Cup has been the best guide signposting nine of the last 27 winners, eight of which finished between third and sixth at Epsom. The John Porter isn’t as relevant a guide as in the past but the Huxley Stakes at Chester won by last season’s dual Derby winner, Lambourn, has also been a good guide as four of the last seven winners of that Group 3 race to run in the Hardwicke Stakes have notched up three wins and a second.

Trip-wise, only Indian Creek, Await The Dawn and Fanny Logan in the last 29 years were recording their first success over at least 1m4f so don’t look to contenders primarily known as being 1m2f horses as this 1m4f takes some getting. All but six of the last 24 winners had placed at worst in a Group race earlier in the season, the omissions being Sea Moon who won a Listed race, Idaho who ran as if he badly needed his seasonal return in the Coronation Cup, Broome who was unplaced in the Tattersalls Gold Cup, the seasonal debutantes, Wonderful Tonight and Pyledriver, and Isle Of Jura who had run in Listed races abroad and at home.

Six of the last 14 favourites have won so it’s been a decent race for the market leader.