Shergar Cup

The Shergar Cup is an annual horse racing event held at Ascot Racecourse, usually during early August. The race is named in honour of Shergar, the horse that won the 1981 Derby, and was originally sponsored by Shergar's owner, the Aga Khan. The event is currently sponsored by Dubai Duty Free.

The event was first held in 1999 at Goodwood Racecourse, but has been held at Ascot since 2000 (except in 2005, when Ascot was closed so the grandstand could be redeveloped). Unusually, for a horse racing event, it is a team competition, with jockeys invited to join the teams (two teams from 1999 to 2004; four teams from 2006) divided by their presenting countries or region, or their gender, and the winning team determined by their overall performance across six races. The winning team is presented with a silver trophy of Shergar, donated by the Aga Khan. Described as "racing's most populist event", it attracts around 30,000 spectators each year, and is recognised for attracting families and other new spectators beyond the usual race-going demographic.

The event was championed by the British Horseracing Board chairman Peter Savill, with the aim of creating a competition similar to the Ryder Cup in golf.

The inaugural competition was held at Goodwood in May 1999, between two teams of horses with owners from Europe (led by Robert Sangster) against owners from the Middle East (led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and his family, including 12 horses from the Godolphin Racing stable).

The competition moved to Ascot in 2000, and the Middle East team became a "Rest of the World" (ROW) team. The event was blighted by a dearth of runners; some European-owned horses were transferred to the ROW team to balance the numbers, but only one race had a full field of ten runners, and two set off with fields of only five or six runners. The low turnout was attributed to the races being unclassified.

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