Scott Smith will be first to go for the Great Britain team when he rides Cabri d’elle in his first Aachen Nations Cup today. This is a position that the 28-year-old Yorkshireman would be happy to swap, since he would prefer to see how the course is riding before he sets out to tackle it – but he will abide by the wishes of chef d’?ipe Derek Ricketts. Smith was also the pathfinder in Lisbon, where the team won their only Nations Cup this year, and their first since an unexpected victory here two years ago.
“Scott’s horse is fast,” Ricketts said. “We don’t have a chance to study how tight the time is at that stage, so it’s good to have him going first.” The effect of the time allowed will be more obvious for Smith’s three team-mates: Mark Armstrong, who goes second on Elise, followed by Richard Davenport on Grand Marnier and Tim Stockdale on Parcival.Michael Whitaker will be watching from the stands. Handel II, the most talented of his mounts, jumped far better than in recent outings when making a single error in the first round of yesterday’s Nordrhein-Westfalen Preis. Whitaker was delighted with the improved performance, but he did not want to face the challenge of Aachen’s Nations Cup with the stallion so soon after he had regained his form.

Ricketts was happy to go along with Whitaker’s wishes, especially as Handel is back in the reckoning for a place in September’s World Equestrian Games.Germany filled the top two places for the Nordrhein-Westfalen Preis. The contest was won by the European champion Ludger Beerbaum on Goldfever, who finished 0.3sec ahead of this year’s World Cup winner, Otto Becker on Landy. Sweden’s Rolf-Goran Bengtsson filled third place on Innovation, with the relatively new partnership of Ireland’s Peter Charles and Jerome a close fourth.. The Ascot grandstands are to suffer the same fate as London Bridge, to be replaced by a £180m development which management believe will make the Royal racecourse the best in the world. In the interim, arrangements will be made to stage the Royal cards, though there are threats to the course’s other principal King George and Festival Of British Racing meetings.

“The only thing we are saying is that we won’t miss a Royal meeting,” Douglas Erskine-Crum, the course chief executive, said yesterday.Ascot has been the site of Royal racing since 1711 and, in the more modern era, has been redeveloped roughly every 50 years.The present stands are 40 years old and other buildings on the site go back a century. Plans to replace them, which are already five years old, are designed to maintain and even enhance Ascot’s standing in the global turf order.”Whilst excellent nationally, we concluded that the current racecourse facilities would fall behind unless we redeveloped and we wanted to be the best,” Erskine-Crum said “Shortcomings include an unimpressive arrival and welcome There is no grand entrance. In fact, there are lots of different entrances all over the racecourse and you wouldn’t know you were coming into one of the great racecourses of the world.”It has been a real challenge for the management team to provide the standards that are required by customers today. We thought about refurbishments and other options, but if we didn’t redevelop we have no doubt we would have slid rather slowly downhill, first internationally and then nationally. Ascot intends to build the finest racecourse in the world.”Detailed planning and preparation of the new Ascot began in 1997 in conjunction with lead designer Rod Sheard, the man responsible for the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Stadium Australia for the 2000 Olympics, and various racecourses around the world.His vision is a move away from the large box appearance of the current main enclosure. Its replacement features an arched parasol roof and looks like a flying-saucer spaceship hugging the terrain. Plans show stepped viewing terraces at either end.Most striking of all though is the galleria, the “environmental lung” which runs 350 metres through the centre of the stands.