Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup Stakes
The Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup is an American Thoroughbred horse race race for three-year-old fillies held annually since 1984 at Keeneland Race Course near Lexington, Kentucky. Run at a distance of one and one-eighth miles on the turf, the Grade I race currently offers a purse of $500,000. It is an important prep race to the Breeders' Cup Filly & Mare Turf.
The race was inaugurated on October 11, 1984, in honor of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, who attended the Keeneland races, during her private visit to Central Kentucky, and who presented a trophy on that date.
Since inception, the race has been contested at various distances:
- 1984 - 1 1/16 miles on dirt
- 1985-1989 - 1 1/16 miles on turf
- 1990-present - 1 1/8 miles on turf
The Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup was a Listed race in 1984 and 1985, a Grade III race in 1986 and 1987, and a Grade II race from 1988 through 1990 after which it became a Grade I event.
Read more about Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup Stakes: Records, Winners of The Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup
Famous quotes containing the words queen, challenge, cup and/or stakes:
“Happy are your wives! Happy are these your servants, who continually attend you and hear your wisdom!”
—Bible: Hebrew, 1 Kings 10:8.
The queen of Sheba to Solomon.
“...Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“It is surely easier to confess a murder over a cup of coffee than in front of a jury.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.”
—William Empson (1906–1984)