Michael Owen: 'He’s a very very nice horse - absolutely earmarked for Royal Ascot'

Michael Owen and Hugo Palmer have enjoyed considerable success together since teaming up four years ago, yet one prize they long for as a partnership is a Royal Ascot winner.

Manor House Stables heads into the Royal meeting as one of the most successful yards with two-year-old runners this season and at the time of writing, Palmer has an impressive 42% strike rate with his juveniles on turf, having trained five winners from twelve runners.

Spearheading the two-year-old team is the unbeaten Mehmas colt, Adaay Of Scarlett, who was most recently seen winning at the Berkshire track over five furlongs.

Former football star Owen, who has worked hard to attract well-known sports personalities to the sport through racehorse ownership, talks about the importance of leveraging that to promote the sport.

English darts players Luke Littler and Stephen Bunting are the latest sporting greats to get involved at Manor House and they have an exciting two-year-old to look forward to in Bunting Mental later in the season.

How does winning at Royal Ascot rank in terms of the stable's ambitions for the year?

That’s a huge ambition of ours, we’d love to have a winner at Royal Ascot together. Manor House has done it, Hugo Palmer has done it, but we haven’t done it together yet, so that would be a lovely first for us.

It’s the world championships, the eyes of the world are watching Ascot.

You have an unbeaten two-year-old in Adaay Of Scarlett, what do you make of his chances and will he be the yard's leading contender at Royal Ascot?

We are debating whether to run him next week at Sandown as a prep, he’s a very very nice horse.

He’s really muscled up and is looking good and he’s got a lovely attitude so absolutely, he’ll be one of our most exciting runners of the week.

We’re looking at having ten - twelve runners so we will go there well represented but yes he’s absolutely earmarked for Royal Ascot it’s just whether we run him again beforehand or we go straight there.

Who's your leading hope from the older horses?

I think Dubai Bling is in really good form, he runs on the Saturday in the Wokingham.

We will possibly have two runners in that race with Roman Dragon taking his place as well.

I think Dubai Bling looks like a progressive sprinter at the moment so out of the older horses he would be one I am looking forward to.

Will Seagulls Eleven be part of your Ascot team?

I’m not sure what Hugo’s thinking about Seagulls Eleven.

He travels to France today, he ran second in a Group 2 race in France at the beginning of May and a lot depends on the ground as well.

He’s been reasonably versatile but Ascot normally has rattling fast ground so we’ll see what the weather does.

He’s certainly good enough and he’s now our highest rated horse in the yard; it's just whether Hugo’s got it on his agenda.

What does having owners like the Brighton footballers and Darts players bring to the yard?

It’s lovely to have people like that in the yard. I work my nuts off to be honest, one for myself for Manor House and selling horses and also for the game for racing as a whole.

Racing has benefited over the years from the hard work I've put in trying to get the likes of Wayne Rooney involved.

Virtually every single sportsman that’s entered the game has started off at Manor House Stables. It’s great we can attract people like that.

You need to have people like that to command headlines and then to have a good horse because then that goes hand in hand and it’s a bloody good story then!

Do you think the sport of horse racing does enough to leverage the fact that personalities from other sports are involved in racehorse ownership?

You have to be a little bit careful, when I brought along Sir Alex Ferguson, Wayne Rooney, Luke Littler, Stephen Bunting and Kyren Wilson the world’s snooker champion, I don't tend to abuse that.

Sometimes they want to come here and see their horses work, they don’t want to be all over social media.

I don’t take advantage of their fame and stardom, they can come here and have a laugh and a drink, go for lunch and enjoy the sport as opposed to me trying to take advantage of another famous person owning a horse.

How excited are you about Bunting Mental, the Ardad colt Luke Littler and Stephen Bunting are part of?

We are really excited about the horse, he’s only a baby - a two year old.

We're not trying to force him to race straight away, we’ve got around 70 two-year-olds and only six have run so far.

He will run when he is physically and mentally able to do so but we are excited. He does show that he has ability but the hardest thing is finding a day in the diary when we are all available so they can come and see him!

Bet on Royal Ascot and the 2026 World Cup here.