Portcullis gets royal breeders dreaming at Newmarket’s ancient first rite of spring

John Gosden’s three-year-old was among those catching the eye at the Craven meeting, which has been attracting dreamers and optimists since 1771

Captain Cook was a few months away from landfall after his first circumnavigation of the earth when the first Craven meeting was held on Newmarket heath in the spring of 1771. It is older than any of the Classics, and old enough too to have the great Potoooooooo – who got his name when a stable lad was unsure how to spell potatoes – on the Craven Stakes’s roll of honour in 1782. For a quarter of a millennium, the first meeting of the year on the Rowley Mile at Newmarket has been Flat racing’s first rite of spring.

“It’s what keeps everybody going,” Jason Singh, the marketing director of the famous bloodstock auction house Tattersalls said here on Thursday, “and I speak as a breeder and racehorse owner myself as well as a sales company employee.