Royal Ascot 2025: updates, previews and more on Gold Cup day – live

• Latest updates from day three’s racing at Royal Ascot

• Greg Wood’s day two report and preview | Email Tony

4.20pm GOLD CUP preview

Until a couple of weeks ago, this was expected to be the race in which Kyprios, the winner in 2022 and 2024 and absent due to injury in 2023, would confirm his place among the all-time staying greats with a third Gold Cup success. His sudden retirement leaves a glaring vacancy at the top of the staying division and the most interesting candidate to succeed him as the winner of Royal Ascot’s showpiece event is Francis-Henri Graffard’s gelding Candelari, in the colours of the late Aga Khan IV, whose father won this race all the way back in 1934 with the excellent Felicitation. The latest Gold Cup contender in green and red is a four-year-old who did not see a racecourse until making a successful debut on Chantilly’s all-weather track in December 2024, and arrives at Ascot with a four-from-five record that should perhaps be a perfect five. He is an impressive physical specimen who showed a fine turn of foot to win the Prix Vicomtesse Vigier at Longchamp in May.

Trawlerman and Illinois have taken two thirds of all the cash staked on this race.

Garden of Eden at 11/2 is the biggest single win bet on Oddschecker. Continue reading...