An afternoon where Douvan's coronation turned into a car crash

Lost amid the fanfare of the Jockey Club’s recent £45m (€51.6m) facelift of Prestbury Park, with its 6,500-capacity grandstand, new members’ facilities and improved bars, was a fresh expanse of artificial grass about the size of a tennis court just to the left of the jockeys’ weighing room.

This is the loser’s enclosure. It is no lush mat but rather a bald and uninviting carpet that has been worn down to a bad five-a-side pitch by the many hundreds of hooves that for so many years before that had ploughed this small patch of premium land into a miasma of muck.

No longer a threat to an owner or trainer’s best brogues, it remains a hushed, haunted environment where dreams of a lifetime go to be mourned as connections and jockeys huddle together and dissect defeats and disasters in intimate little huddles.