Royal Ascot ready to run races behind closed doors if it goes ahead in June

• Ascot considers unprecedented move for social highlight
• Classics in limbo as new dates sought for Guineas and Derby

What’s the point of Royal Ascot without the fancy dresses, absurd hats and the champagne-guzzling revellers who wear them? If there is an answer to that question, it will be identified this summer, as the 109-year-old event is to be staged behind closed doors, assuming that it goes ahead at all.

Fans of horse racing felt the ground shifting beneath their feet when the news was announced on Tuesday afternoon, just moments after Jockey Club officials said the first four Classic races of the year, the 1,000 and 2,000 Guineas, the Derby and the Oaks, were to be postponed indefinitely. The Guineas would normally take place at Newmarket in May, the Derby and the Oaks at Epsom in early June, but it is now accepted as impossible to press ahead with such important races on those dates.

It was widely imagined that Royal Ascot could also be postponed until, say, late July in the hope that racing might be up and running by then. But many of the races scheduled to take place there are designed for a particular moment in the development of two-year-old and three-year-old thoroughbreds. Delaying them would mean bumping into competing races at other tracks, later in the summer. Those who run the Queen’s track accept it will have to be mid-June or nothing, and they see no prospect, in view of the present restrictions necessitated by the coronavirus, of their being allowed to bring in up to 70,000 people per day just two months from now.

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