It was a classic and comforting sight on Britain’s sporting calendar: Queen Elizabeth II smiled and waved from inside a horse-drawn carriage leading other members of the Royal Family in a procession along the Royal Ascot racecourse.
The monarch then spent the day watching the races from the Royal Enclosure and cheering on her horses – win or lose.
And she won a lot.
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Horse racing was the great sporting fascination of the Queen, who died on Thursday at the age of 96. She first rode a horse at the age of 3 – and was immediately hooked – and was to inherit the breeding and racing stock of her father, King George VI, when she ascended the throne in 1952.
She became one of the biggest faces in British and global horse racing.
The Queen has also attended some of the most iconic events in British sporting history.
She presented the Jules Rimet trophy to England captain Bobby Moore as the national football team won the 1966 men’s World Cup at Wembley Stadium by beating West Germany.
She was in the Royal Box on Center Court at Wimbledon when British player Virginia Wade won the women’s singles title in 1977, the championship’s centenary.
And most recently, she had a cameo appearance at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, when she filmed a comedy skit with James Bond actor Daniel Craig in which the Queen – well, a stunt double, anyway – is dating jumped from a helicopter and parachuted into the Olympic Stadium. She granted Danny Boyle, who officiated the ceremony, and his crew access to her quarters at Buckingham Palace for a day-long shoot a few months earlier.
Horse racing was her great love, however, and she was often seen visiting the Royal Stud at her Sandringham estate, tenderly patting her horses.
“My racing philosophy is simple,” she said in a BBC documentary, The Queen’s Racehorses: A Personal View. “I enjoy breeding a horse that is faster than other people’s.
“And for me, that’s a gamble from a long time ago. I like racing but I guess I love horses at heart and Thoroughbred to me embodies a really good horse.”
The Queen has had almost 2,000 winners as a racehorse owner, with her jockeys always wearing crimson, gold and scarlet – the colors of the fabled royal racing silks also used by father and great-grandfather, King Edward VII.
Her first winner was a horse named Monaveen at Fontwell in 1949, and she won every so-called ‘classic’ in British horse racing, with the exception of The Derby, another event in which she competed for most of her life.
One of the Queen’s most famous victories came at Royal Ascot in 2013, when Estimate became the first horse owned by a reigning monarch to win the prestigious Gold Cup. It was her first victory in an elite race since 1989 and she was seen clapping enthusiastically as jockey Ryan Moore went first with a neck in front of 61,000 spectators.
Michael Stoute, who trained the Queen’s horses, said winning races gave her a “special thrill”.
“She really loves this game,” he said after Estimate’s win, “and it’s a great recovery for her.”
She was the champion owner in British flat racing on two occasions, in 1954 and ’57.
The Queen even competed in America’s biggest horse race, the Kentucky Derby, in 2007 while visiting the heart of US racing in the Kentucky Bluegrass Country.
Following the announcement of the Queen’s death, Britain’s Horse Racing Authority said racing in the UK would be suspended for the remainder of Thursday and Friday “as we begin to mourn the death of Her Majesty and remember her extraordinary life and contribution to our sport.” and to remember our nation. “