Frankie falls short of a Sensational Six but sets Ascot alight again

As the clock ticked down to 5pm the ring was the place to be. Across Royal Ascot's first two days bookmakers used umbrellas to protect themselves from the rain. All they could do to protect themselves from Frankie was to offer derisory prices about Turgenev. So they did. The punters still backed him.

They backed him because of what had already happened over two remarkable hours. They backed him because of what happened here 23 years ago. They backed him because they wanted a piece of action, so that they could say not only had they been there to see it, they had also won a few quid.

Plenty of them had already been winning, quite simply because Frankie Dettori had been winning. He had won the first, the second, the third and the fourth. Now he was trying to win the fifth.