Ascot bad behaviour: is the sport of kings losing its crown?

A racegoer was hospitalised and hundreds more were treated at Royal Ascot's medical centre as a heatwave brought sizzling conditions to this year's meeting.

News coverage was of how "lengthy queues" formed at the water dispensers as spectators in top hats and tails "sweltered", said The Telegraph, marking a change from last year's gathering, when police made 36 arrests for assault, drink driving and possession of class A drugs.

'Defecating on doorsteps'

Ascot is a "picture-postcard" British town, wrote Josh Saunders in The Sun, but residents find themselves "bracing themselves for bedlam" during Royal Ascot. Locals told Saunders they face "pissed-up revellers urinating on their properties, defecating on doorsteps and brazenly snorting cocaine off walls". "Yobs" brawl in the street and the litter left behind "attracts vermin".

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It's not just Royal Ascot that hits the headlines for the wrong reasons. Ladies Day at the Grand National festival is meant to be "one of the most glamorous days" in the racing calendar, wrote John Jones on Wales Online, but it's become "debauched", with fights at the 2024 event. "Shocking" pictures included a "suited man with blood pouring out of his mouth" shaping up to hit another racegoer.

Police warnings that there would be zero tolerance for misbehaviour at this year's Grand National fell on deaf ears as racegoers began "pouring their own pints" after being "left shocked" by the cost of drinks, wrote Zac Campbell on Mail Online. Four pints of Guinness set fans back a "staggering" £31.20", a glass of Prosecco was £12, while a bottle cost £46.

Cheltenham Festival also saw "fights, drinking and harassment" in 2024, said ITV News, but drinking rules were actually "relaxed" at the meeting this year in a bid to address a "sales slump", said Will Humphries in The Times. Where boozers were previously "corralled into bars with TV screens and segregated hospitality areas", this year people were allowed to "take their drinks trackside".

Drinks "on the lawns and within sight of the running rail" was expected to "infuriate" more traditional racegoers, who "simply want to focus on the horses", said Greg Wood in The Guardian. An 80-year-old woman told Humphries that "there was a man so drunk at 10am that he was wobbling around", while a 76-year-old man said it was a "shame" that the racing wasn't enough "for some people" and that drinking "seems to take over" in the "modern world".

'Snob and mob'

The increased drunkenness at racing events has attracted attention beyond Britain: compiling a gallery of racegoing debauchery for the US site Defector, Kathryn Xu noted that "extremely drunk, extremely dressed-up" English people had misbehaved at the 2024 Grand National.

But it's not booze that's ruining racing, wrote Arabella Byrne in The Spectator, it's the middle classes. Ascot "ought to be" a "proper knees-up", except "it's not" because the organisers have engaged in "aggressive commercialisation", transforming the meeting into an "exercise in manicured social segregation led by the Middleton classes".

This is a shame, she added, because "horsey and racing circles" have always been based on a mix that's "one of the great curiosities of English social life: snob and mob". In fact, "true toffs" prefer the experience to be a "bit more bonkers and a lot more louche".