It's so good to share as Royal Ascot's stardust is sprinkled around

Ascot's clerk of the course Chris Stickels produced beautifully judged ground for the royal meeting – not a complaint all week – but he will have to put in some repair work reseeding the scorch marks left by Alpha Centauri's dismemberment of her Coronation Stakes field.

That old adage 'by a country mile' is apt to describe her performance – the Coronation is over a mile and she proved in a different country.

It took the ever incisive Tom Segal to put his finger on the exact degree of her quality when pointing out in Sunday's Racing Post that the runner-up Threading also beat the course record and was beaten six lengths. Trainers of other top-drawer eight-furlong fillies can only read that stat and weep.