Words: Gentleman's Journal
Master horse trainer Henry Cecil fought failure and illness to make Frankel his ultimate champion. For Sportsman’s Journal, Colin Cameron traces the rise of the pair who changed history
In the winners’ enclosure at Royal Ascot some years ago, a racehorse trainer greets the winner he has just saddled with an understandably broad grin. Very quickly the trainer is engulfed by a scrum of tipsters and newspaper reporters, one of whom asks, ‘So, what is the plan?’
‘Plan,’ the trainer replies. ‘What’s the plan? That was the feffing plan.’
The trainer? Today nobody can remember his name. Strange, for whoever it was stood alone, altogether different to the game’s template. In racing, folk are always looking forward. Gamblers, jockeys, and, yes, trainers. Perennial hope for the future is one of the reasons the last listed struggle to retire. There just might be something special in the stable that demands all connected can begin to dream of great days to come.
And then there is Frankel. This colt of colts demands we look back. For one, his immaculate race record, from 2010 to 2012 of 14 wins out of 14, places him in the supremely distinguished bracket of unbeaten champions, membership of which proved beyond the likes of Shergar and Secretariat.
His trainer, the late Henry Cecil who died in 2013, also requires us to reflect on days gone by. Over 45 years, he proved himself to have an equine empathy beyond our understanding. Greats like Slip Anchor, Reference Point and Ardross passed through his hands and, because of this, fulfilled every drop of their potential. In a career stretching back six decades and ended only by cancer, there were 25 English Classic races – the season’s best; the 1,000 & 2,000 Guineas, the Oaks and Derby at Epsom and Doncaster’s St. Leger – and ten trainers’ championships.
And Frankel was, by any measure, his greatest.
Frank Conlon partnered some of the best. A Newmarket institution with Henry on and off through the trainer’s career, Conlon shared many of the great days at Cecil’s Warren Place stables before Frankel. A work rider, who would be entrusted by Cecil to ride tomorrow’s champions on the gallops ahead of their racecourse triumphs, he observed Cecil at work in the yard and witnessed how the trainer found a path for Frankel’s predecessors.
Henry,’ Conlon would say. ‘The master.’
Frankel was his ultimate servant. Today, aged eight, he is at stud at Newmarket’s Banstead Manor with sons and daughters whose racing careers are ahead of them. He was bred for success, himself. His sire is Galileo, a champion on the racecourse and also at stud.
The star on Frankel’s face with which he was born on February 11, 2008, could have been a sign. The four white socks he had at the bottom of each leg could be a metaphor for the extraordinary balance he always showed at the track.
The colt arrived at Warren Place yard ahead of his two-year-old season in 2010. Old colleagues of Conlon nurtured him on the gallops ahead of a racing debut in August. After breaking his duck at the first time of asking, at Newmarket, the rest of his first season was a passage through the gears, with three further successes, including the Dewhurst Stakes, a race – again at Newmarket – that usually goes home with the best colt of a generation.
For Frankel ahead was a winter of relative rest. Even better was to come. As a three-year-old, the records tumbled. For his success in the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket he was, at 2-1 on, the shortest priced favourite in decades. It was a canter. ‘Barely believable,’ said the newspapers. The Racing Post placed him immediately in the ‘superstar’ category.
Further success followed at Royal Ascot and Goodwood. After the latter, Cecil said Frankel was not only the best he had trained but also the best he’d ever seen. Back at Ascot in the autumn for the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, he underscored the notion. A virtual lap of honour was completed.
At nine wins from the same number of runs, Frankel was without blemish.
Henry Cecil, trainer with Frankel after winning The Queen Anne Stakes in 2012
Horses of Frankel’s stature more often head for stud after two seasons of racing. Frankel’s owner and breeder, Prince Khalid Abdullah, took the view that we all needed to see more of him. A third season of racing began where he had started the previous year – Newbury – and then moved onto Royal Ascot and Goodwood, where Frankel became the only horse ever to win the meeting’s most prestigious contest, the Sussex Stakes, twice. Then he triumphed at York before returning to Ascot again for another Fall finale. There he signed off from racing with success in the Champion Stakes. A race so named never had a more fitting winner.
Frankel was ranked as the best racehorse since comparative records began in 1977. Before then? Such discussions are the meat and drink of racing.
As Frankel raced to immortality, his trainer was dying of cancer. A dandy all his life, Cecil had stood out in every respect, from the colour of his socks and ties to a racy edge to his personal life that would cascade from the racing pages into newspaper diary columns and beyond.
In sickness, the anticipation of his own racecourse appearances matched that which his racehorses – including Frankel – generated. The public – Henry’s public – wanted to pay their respects and wish him well. They always had, whether in success or amid strife – anyone at Newmarket after Cecil had lost the patronage of the Maktoum family in 1995 will recall the emotional reception the trainer received on saddling a winner – just more so at this time.
Of course, cancer is an altogether tougher challenge than a fallout with patrons and Cecil raged against the malaise. Is it too much to say he lived for Frankel? He died in 2013, just a few months after Frankel’s retirement, having been knighted two years earlier. Maybe, with Frankel gone, for the first time in his professional life, Cecil stopped looking forward. Perhaps instead he savoured just a little bit more intensely moments with the flowers in the rose garden at Warren Place that he had made famous. Also, a deeper preoccupation may have been his model soldier collection. He was fighting his own battle, of course, which came to an end in June. The following week’s Royal Ascot was Hamlet without the prince.
Hugh Routledge/REX/Shutterstock
Before Frankel, we might have remembered Henry Cecil for his way with fillies. John Joyce was a colleague of Conlon’s. He rode some of the great Warren Place distaff stars; Diminuendo, who won the Epsom Oaks, Oh So Sharp, who won the fillies’ triple crown of 1,000 Guineas, Oaks and St Leger, Indian Skimmer. ‘Henry was brilliant with the fillies,’ Joyce recalled. ‘He would not overdo it with them. It was instinct. You cannot put your finger on it. Henry was brilliant with the fillies…you cannot put it into words; he just was.’
And unbeatable with a colt called Frankel.
This article was written by Colin Cameron for Sportsman’s Journal.
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