Unbeaten Frankel

After Brad Wiggins’s Tour de France victory, Mo Farah’s Olympics successes and Andy Murray’s first Grand Slam title, any other result would have been unthinkable, so praise the Lord that Frankel did win Ascot’s Champion Stakes. On unsuitably soft ground and after gifting the others lengths at the start, the unbeaten star of world racing proved that he could fight as well as run. Now it is off to a pampered life in the breeding sheds with the hope of lots of little Frankels to come.

I have never seen a crowd like it at Ascot. The roads were choked three hours before. The velvet collars and City suits were there, so were the trilby-and-cords set. But so were the likely lads with gelled hair and ties at half-mast, the giggling girls in chiffons and high heels, the tatty anoraks and the chancers in pointed sharkskin shoes, all gathered to pay homage. In the parade ring before Frankel’s Champion Stakes, with the trees turning Olympic gold and the whiff of burger frying floating past, there were celebs such as Bryan Ferry and plenty of owners and trainers who didn’t have a runner. As Frankel’s party, led into the paddock with his usual quiet elegance by the silver-haired Prince Khalid Abdullah, I looked back at the vast stand to see balconies packed with flags in the pink and green of his colours. Even so, the mood before the race was one as much of anxiety as of elation. ‘He is going to win it, isn’t he?’ we were all asking each other before Frankel’s 14th and final contest.

There was some reassurance when, in the race before, the million-pound Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, Excelebration, the talented miler who has so often followed Frankel home some lengths behind in second place, triumphed in the style of the supremely talented and consistent horse he is, too.