Not for the first time Qipco Champions Day, at the fag end of the season when most Group One winners are gearing up for the Breeders’ Cup in California or pensioned off to stud, or beginning winter holidays, took place in a bog in summer sunlight at Ascot. Can we regard them as ‘champions’? The racing itself certainly enervated a crowd such as is only seen this once at the premier course, outside the Royal meeting.

Star of the show had to be Kyprios – and not just because he was sent by all-conquering champion trainer (for the seventh time) Aidan O’Brien who is never obsessive about this meeting, sandwiched between the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and the Breeders’ Cup.

Another genuine star was Oisin Murphy, crowned champion for a fourth time after missing the last two year’s challenge through indiscretions that brought him a long suspension. So many great sportsmen (and women) do not subscribe to the squeaky clean, butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths image of a noble athlete, but they mostly exist and perform in a different stratosphere so what they get up to, while it can’t be absolved, needs a measure of tolerance. Murphy got a tremendous reception – he’s head and shoulders above his contemporaries.

There were five Group Ones on the day, £4 million in prize money – and the inevitable handicap bringing up the rear to fill bookmaker’s coffers as punters struggled to find the winning outsider.

And those who regard racing as an end to provide for the future of the breed would have been dismayed that the first two in the Champion Stakes – 40-1 winner Anmaat and favourite Calandagan – are geldings. Had the home side’s main hope, Economics, fulfilled his potential then a stallion job would have been there for the taking. When Anmaat’s jockey Jim Crowley said “I smelled blood in the straight even though I was trapped behind a wall of horses” he wasn’t referring to the blood that appeared in the nostrils of Economics. It had happened at York when he won the Dante and may well compromise his chance at stud.

On a very different dark, dank evening on Kempton all-weather four years ago, Anmaat and Bay Bridge were both beaten on their maiden race debut. Yet they have won two of the last four Champions Stakes. Moreover, Anmaat would not be anywhere near the racehorse who carried the same Shadwell blue colours – Baaeed – to defeat behind Bay Bridge in the Champion two years ago. The loss of Hamdan Al Maktoum, founder of Shadwell, and Khalid Abdulla founder of Juddmonte, though it has diminished the influence of the former (Anmaat was Shadwell’s first Group One of the season) has done little to halt the march of the latter. Both men were great inspirations whose finest accomplishments were to leave their creations intact and operational.

Baaeed has retired to Shadwell with high hopes for his stallion future. Juddmonte of course harbour Frankel and Kingman, and priceless mares of the quality of Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe heroines Enable and Bluestocking. ‘New money’ is trawling up yearlings like they were autumn leaves blown around Tattersalls Sales complex where million pound purchases were ‘ten a penny’ and the second highest price ever paid through the ring, 4.4million gns by Amo Racing (they spent 8 million in all) Frankel filly has been deposited in a paddock near me – prior to training next year, just across the road with Ralph Beckett at Kimpton Down. That’s the home, for the moment, of Bluestocking. A decision will soon be made whether she stays in training.

Just imagine a Juddmonte mating of Arc heroine Bluestocking with Frankel! Beyond price.

And, almost inevitably, Juddmonte were on the Ascot roll of honour in the Champion Fillies and Mares through Kalpana – Juddmonte through and through. Kalpana’s career began, as a three-year-old on Tapeta in a Wolverhampton maiden in January. She wasn’t favourite and scrambled home. Charyn too started off eccentrically, on the second day of the turf season in Listed company at Doncaster. Now though after battling – in every sense of the word – to Champions Mile victory, his third Group 1 of the season – this was his last appearance in public before the son of Dark Angel, who mixes it in the sire’s league with Frankel, Sea The Stars, Dubawi, heads for stud.

Kyprios must be acknowledged as a stayer to be mentioned in the same breath as Yeats and Stradivarius, most recent multiple wearers of the stayer’s crown, the Ascot Gold Cup. He missed last year’s Ascot Gold Cup due to a life threatening ailment. Only two weeks ago he’d landed the gruelling Prix du Cadran at Longchamp on ground as testing as Ascot’s. His victory in Saturday’s Stayers championship was his fifth Group One this year. The race is only Group2 but, eh, whose counting? Kyprios is a noble animal though never having won one of his Group Ones at less than a mile and three-quarters his stud career may follow Yeats down the jumping route.

In between Kyprios’s Royal Ascot victories Courage Mon Ami slipped in his Gold Cup. That result was more momentous even than appeared at the time since it announced the arrival of Wathnan Racing, under the aegis of the Emir of Qatar who along with Amo Racing, the plaything (if a serious one) of a leading football agent. Who said there’s more money in oil than football? They intend challenging the hegemony of Coolmore, Juddmonte, Cheveley Park, Lanwades and other established racing institutions.

They are making inroads – Courage Mon Ami came early – Wathnan’s first year: this year they, and Amo, have been making the impact that only endless millions can afford – afford to lose – and replace. Amo didn’t make the winner’s stand this time but Wathnan’s Kind of Blue, running for the first time in their own blue colours (drab brown sleeves and red cap), took the Champions Sprint – in which five Group One winners went down to a colt winning his first at the highest level. Kind of Blue, two of whose relations had won this race in the past, bought for ‘an undisclosed sum’ was Wathnan’s first Group One of the season. But it won’t be the last in the coming years.

When Coolmore and Godolphin (neither, relatively, hugely engaged at the Sales), Cheveley Park and Juddmonte need another standard bearer their breeding arms mint another one. The ‘new boys’ get what they want through purchasing power – when they need more money they just mint it! Eventually they may build up breeding behemoths from their racing successes. Amo, as I said winless this weekend, were quick to occupy headlines by announcing they had retired last year’s Champion Stakes winner and Derby runner-up King of Steel to the Tally-Ho Stud in Ireland.

Overblown publicity generally has the opposite effect intended. The razzmatazz of Champions Day attracted a younger audience than normal and though the actual numbers weren’t forthcoming it felt like there was a substantial crowd. Retaining them for the lesser and humdrum meetings is the problem. Also there were far too many hard luck stories than a championship meeting should have to bear and many of the races were roughhouses the form of which one couldn’t guarantee would be reproduced. But if you match fields of class horses on a morass and, as was forced on the Ascot executive, transfer the events to the tighter inner course usually reserved for the hurdlers, then you have to cross your heart and hope you get the ‘right’ results. On this occasion nobody could say we didn’t – but reputations were enhanced or made in very singular conditions.

Anyone attending lowly meetings at Sedgefield or Kempton the day after Ascot would not recognize them as being the same sport – in terms of prize money, quality of competitors, facilities, media coverage and of course numbers. To be fair the two Sunday meetings could hardly control the climate – one day at Ascot an Indian summer with ‘the stars aligning’; the next day, either just along the motorway at Kempton Park or way up north at rustic Sedgefield - one foot in winter, can’t have had the same appeal.

And those currently buying their seat at the top table may well find living up to the hype is a lot lot harder than, well, merely minting it.