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. As one commentator put it, ‘Even today he could only beat Frankel by turning up half an hour earlier.’ But there was still that edge, that niggling fear that Fate would deprive us of a happy ending. One seasoned racegoer reminded me how at Doncaster on St Leger day the hot favourite Camelot, after one of the less effective rides in Joseph O’Brien’s stellar career, had failed to meet the expectations of the Coolmore team and of the hundreds of thousands who had backed him. ‘It was like a death in the family,’ he said. ‘And one of the Coolmore team told me, “There probably will be a death in the family.”’
In the event, Frankel won splendidly against two toughies who had proved they could act on the rain-softened ground, Cirrus des Aigles and Nathaniel. Ironically, the horse whom they had feared might be too buzzy and hot-headed to reveal his best on the track had by now been taught so brilliantly to relax by the Henry Cecil team that he virtually fell out of the stalls like a sleepwalker leaving poor Ian Mongan on Bullet Train, his pacemaker, looking round nervously to see where he had got to. Jockey Tom Queally, though, gave Frankel time to collect himself. It is never so easy coming from behind on heavy ground but he came up to Cirrus des Aigles two furlongs out with the crowd roaring on their champion and went away to win by a one and three quarter lengths’ margin that could have been more.
Few held back their emotions after the race and as vast numbers of spectators dashed from the stands to be in position to cheer Frankel back into the winner’s enclosure, I found myself beside Sir Henry Cecil as the crowds closed in, obliterating the walkway down the steps to the paddock. With Cecil’s voice currently reduced to a whisper by his cancer treatment there was only one thing for it. I pushed through the sea of bodies shouting ‘Make way for the trainer’ like some demented toastmaster. My apologies to those whose feet I trod on or whose ribs I elbowed in the process.
It was a supreme training performance by a master of his art, and the Prince and his racing manager Teddy Grimthorpe deserve huge praise for the calm way in which they have campaigned their superstar. Given the dire conditions that race was run in this year, thank heavens they did not listen to the entreaties to run Frankel over a longer distance in the Arc. There will always be arguments about the all-time greatest, and, since my new book on the hundred greatest horses had to go to press in July before Frankel had attempted ten furlongs for the first time, I could not then put him above Brigadier Gerard who lost one of his 18 races but who won over a mile, ten furlongs and a mile and a half. Now I might be tempted to do so. And perhaps Frankel could provide a handy answer in a year when awarding the BBC Sports Personality of the Year is going to be fiendishly difficult. Why not this time give it to a horse?
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