Royal Ascot 2024: How to watch on TV and which of King’s horses are running

Royal Ascot is the crown jewel of British racing, with five days of competition set against the type of glitz, glamour and royal patronage that other meetings can only dream of.

The King will attend all five days bar Wednesday and the Queen will be there for the entire showpiece.

This year’s meeting will see overall prize money tip beyond £10 million for the first time, with all eight Group One races to be worth a minimum of £650,000.

Click here for Telegraph Sport’s full tipping service for Royal Ascot 2024 and here for the latest news.

When is Royal Ascot?

This year’s meeting started on Tuesday and runs for five days until Saturday, June 22 at Ascot racecourse in Berkshire. The first race on each day of the meeting will go off at 2.30pm, with the final race due off at 6.15pm.

How do I watch it in the UK?

Every race of the meeting is being broadcast live on ITV1, with coverage also available on Sky Sports Racing for subscribers.

How do I watch it in the US?

Assisted by racing anchor Nick Luck, NBC’s streaming service Peacock offers full coverage of the meeting, as will betting-orientated channel FanDuelTV.

Which of the King’s horses are running?

The King and Queen have three more horses to run this week:

• Gilded Water (Finished 12th in King George V Stakes)

• Treasure (Golden Gates Handicap – Saturday)

• Hard To Resist (Sandringham Stakes – Friday)

• Desert Hero (Hardwicke Stakes – Saturday)

Last year, the King and Queen had a memorable winner at the meeting when the aforementioned Desert Hero roared home to take the King George V Stakes.

Latest news

The French winner in waiting

The French have been knocking on the door this week but Ramatuelle can finally open it for them by winning the Coronation Stakes.

Christopher Head’s filly has a lot going for her other than the fact, notwithstanding France is a republic, that her trainer is fifth generation French racing royalty. But he relentlessly refused to trade on that and, ploughing his own furrow, has made a big impact in a short time.

Ramatuelle was, for all except the last three strides, the best filly in the 1,000 Guineas. She was sent on by jockey Aurelean Lemaitre and set up to be shot at. Only in the last few yards was she was closed down by two of today’s rivals, Elmalka and Porta Fortuna.

She was the only filly to have raced prominently that day to have finished in the money and even Fallen Angel, who went on to win the Irish equivalent, could not hack that pace.

Today, Head has replaced Lemaitre with Oisin Murphy who has been on fire this week - three winners so far - and has been riding, talking and behaving with a maturity he lacked in his wilder, younger pre-14 month Covid breach ban, something he might regard one day as the best thing that ever happened to him. He might yet make the replacement for Frankie Dettori that racing craves.

It is a deep race though. Elmalka and Porta Fortuna will have their fans, Ramatuelle’s countryman Rouhiya was a surprise winner of the French Guineas and is clearly good but this is her first start on anything without soft in the going description.

Like Ramatuelle, Aidan O’Brien’s Opera Singer is by Justify, and should come on a ton for her Irish Guineas third if she follows the pattern set by a lot of her stablemates this spring. Back on quicker ground, Falgaria, an also-ran in the French Guineas after beating Elmalka in the Fred Darling, might be worth a second glance even in this company.

When Rosallion won the St James’s Palace on Tuesday his owner-breeder Sheikh Mohammed Obaid implied that the colt Richard Hannon described as the best he had had around his place might not even be the best horse running in his distinctive yellow-and-black spotted silks at Ascot this week; the rival for that distinction, he said, was Inisherin, the colt he also bred which he supplemented for today’s Commonwealth Cup.

That may not be literally from the horse’s mouth but the Sheikh, who bred and owned supersire Dubawi, knows his onions and his trainer Kevin Ryan is definitely not given to flights of fancy. Inisherin dotted up in the Sandy Lane and his biggest danger could be another Yorkshire-trained colt in the same ownership, Elite Status.

He is in a similar bracket to Clive Cox’s Jasour, a quick two-year-old whose form tailed off in the autumn before bouncing back on their one start of the season so far.