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Amid fears in the wider racing industry that affordability checks, tax raids and falling attendance will be the end of us, Ascot sails serenely on towards an exceptional renewal of the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes on Saturday.

The crowds for last month’s Royal meeting were up on all five days to set a new post-Covid record. The track is debt-free, having paid off the final £3m of the loan taken out to build its statement grandstand back in 2006. On Monday, meanwhile, the King’s racecourse announced annual pre-tax profits of £10.5m in 2025 – and almost casually dropped in the news that next year’s King George will be worth a British-record £2.5m. In tough times for racing, and the country as a whole, how does the track keep on keeping on?

Ascot, as the hard-pressed execs at plenty of other British tracks might fairly point out, was born 3-0 up. It was founded by Queen Anne in 1711, has been intimately entwined with royalty ever since and has a branding in the British public’s consciousness that money cannot buy. And above all, it has the unique advantage of the Royal meeting, the richest and most profitable event in the sport.

At the same time, though, Ascot does not just sit back and enjoy its good fortune. Its planning goes well beyond mere survival or maintaining the status quo, and the King George is a case in point.

In recent years, Ascot’s midsummer showpiece – a 12-furlong all-aged Group One – has struggled to keep up with the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, its French counterpart in October, in terms of prize money and prestige.

While older racing fans can reminisce about unforgettable afternoons when greats like Mill Reef, Grundy, Shergar and Dancing Brave added the King George to their CV, truly memorable King Georges have been much more of an exception than the rule since Galileo’s epic defeat of Fantastic Light in 2001.

“Two years ago, we made a very conscious strategic decision that we would focus on the King George as our primary race asset,” Nick Smith, Ascot’s director of racing and public affairs, said this week. “The Royal meeting is the Royal meeting, it’s completely different to everything else, but our primary race asset is not the Gold Cup, it’s not the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, it’s the King George.”

On paper, at least, Saturday’s renewal feels like a throwback to the King George’s glory days, and an immediate reward for the decision to make it – until next year, at least – the most valuable race in Ascot’s history, with a prize fund of £2m.

“The bottom line is that this is the best King George this century, it has to be,” Smith says. “You’ve got the last year’s best and second-best racehorses in the world [Calandagan and Masquerade Ball], and the best one-and-a-half mile three-year-old [Benvenuto Cellini] on current performances. Then you might sort of expect it to dry up, but they’re still coming: Kalapana, Minnie Hauk and also Goliath, the winner two years ago. It’s everything you would ever want a King George or a horse race to be.”

The presence of Masquerade Ball, one of two Japanese-trained runners, in the field feels particularly significant, as Japan’s racing industry – by many measures, the richest and most successful on the planet – cherishes stamina as much as speed in its champions.

Millions of Japanese fans are expected to tune in to live coverage of Saturday’s race, hoping for a first-ever success in the King George which would make Masquerade Ball the hottest stallion prospect in a racing-mad nation.

Ascot’s ultimate aim, though, is to promote the King George as a race in itself, rather than a proving ground for future stallions.

“On Saturday, there will be flags down the course with the colours of every single King George winner, right back to the start,” Smith says. “There’s banners of previous winners around the parade ring and we are unashamedly promoting the horse race.

“We’re not staying come for the concert. We’re not saying come and have your face painted. We’re saying this is Britain’s premier, all-aged race and it’s a very special sporting moment.”

Next year’s prize-money boost to £2.5m will leave the King George behind only the Arc, which has a purse of €5m (£4.24), among European races, and Ascot’s long-term goal is to match the money on offer for the Longchamp showpiece.

It is a bold ambition, not least because French racing’s bookmaker-free funding system, via a pari-mutuel monopoly, ensures a higher return to the sport from betting. Ascot, in fact, is probably the only British track that could seriously hope to achieve it.

“There may be no way that next is going to be as good as this year,” Smith says, “as it’s almost impossible to believe you can put a better field together for a race. But over the next three, four or five years, you’d hope that the King George stays in the top four of the world’s race rankings, as it was last year.

“And we won’t get to the Arc prize money overnight, it will take several years. But the increase [to £2m this year and £2.5m next year] is a very firm statement that this is the start, not the conclusion.”