Qatar Goodwood Festival

The Duke's private course sat 700 feet above sea level, with the English Channel in view on a clear day.

The Duke was Charles Lennox, and the first meeting ran on 25 April 1802 on his Goodwood Estate near Chichester. Officers from the local barracks made up much of the early crowd, so for its first years it was closer to a private fixture than a public race meeting.

It gave the meeting a race that mattered beyond the estate, and Goodwood's reputation as a sporting fixture started here.

The Cup was run over two miles as a staying test, and it became the centrepiece of the summer meeting almost at once. Owners sent their best stayers to contest it, and the rest of the card grew around it over the following decades.

The race that now brings Classic winners to Goodwood is not the one that started in 1841.

The original Sussex Stakes was run in 1841 as a contest for two-year-olds, and in that form it did not take hold. The mile race that carries the name today dates from 1878, and it is the one that earned Group 1 status. It now regularly brings Classic winners and champion milers to the Downs in July.

The nickname marked a change in status: by then Goodwood closed the London social season.

By the mid-Victorian era the July meeting had settled in as the final flourish of that season, and the crowd came out from London for the week. High-quality racing, the Duke's hospitality and the downland setting made it a rival to Royal Ascot for fashionable appeal.

It is why one Sussex estate now runs both a racecourse and a motor circuit.

The estate was requisitioned during the Second World War, and its parkland became RAF Westhampnett, a Battle of Britain fighter station. Racing resumed under the 9th Duke of Richmond once peace returned, and in September 1948 the airfield's perimeter track opened as the Goodwood Motor Circuit.

It brought the facilities up to date without changing the scale of the meeting.

The current Duke of Richmond, Charles Gordon-Lennox, oversaw the work in the late 1990s. A new grandstand and new enclosures replaced ageing facilities, and the meeting kept the garden-party character it had carried since Edward VII's day.

The money that followed took the week to three Group 1 races, the most it has ever carried.

The Qatar Racing and Equestrian Club took the title, and the July meeting was renamed the Qatar Goodwood Festival. Prize money rose across the week, and in 2017 the Goodwood Cup was promoted to Group 1. It joined the Sussex Stakes and the Nassau Stakes, which had held that status already.

The Cup had been a Group 1 for only two years, and it already had the horse that would define it.

The stayer was trained by John Gosden and ridden that day by Frankie Dettori. Double Trigger had won three Cups in the 1990s, but not in consecutive years, so the run was a first. Stradivarius added a fourth win in 2020, and no horse has won the race more often.