? Sir Henry Cecil's colt stretches unbeaten run to nine
? Trainer predicts Frankel will be even better next year
After a week that had been dominated by arguments over the whip, Frankel rose above it all at Ascot on Saturday. His ninth win in as many starts, by four easy lengths in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, set a new standard both for Frankel himself and perhaps the modern thoroughbred too, because no matter how many times the breeders spin the genetic roulette wheel, a horse like this one arrives only once in a lifetime.
There were flickerings of doubt after Frankel's last run at Ascot in June, when Tom Queally sent him for home a long way out and seemed to be looking for the line in the final furlong as the chasing pack closed him down. On Saturday, though, there was not a moment of concern as Queally overtook his pacemaker a quarter of a mile out and then let Frankel loose.
Barely a flick of the whip was required to open up an unassailable lead. Excelebration, a regular pursuer of Frankel during this brilliant three-year-old campaign, did his best to respond, but though he was a Group One winner himself last time out, the gulf in class was too wide. It was another three-and-a-half lengths back to Immortal Verse, the Coronation Stakes winner, as the class in the field came to the fore.
The applause for Frankel had started when he walked into the paddock before the race and it started to roll through the grandstand with half a furlong still to run. It was the performance that the first Champions Day both needed and deserved, and though he is unlikely to go to the track again this season, racing as a whole can now look forward to seeing Frankel return to the track as a four-year-old.
"I was nervous," Sir Henry Cecil, Frankel's trainer, said. "There's no such thing as a certainty and things have got to go right. But everything did go right, he was so relaxed and he's really beginning to grow up. You're going to see a better horse next year and he's pretty good as he is.
"I'm really looking forward to having another winter over him next year and I think he will get a mile and a quarter very easily."
The Timeform organisation, which has been rating thoroughbreds for more than 60 years, gave Frankel a provisional rating of 143 after Saturday's race, a pound ahead of his previous mark, which places him behind only Sea-Bird (145), Brigadier Gerard and Tudor Minstrel (144) in their all-time list. He will also, if he stays sound, have a four-year-old season in which he could push past even those great champions, and Queally, who has ridden Frankel throughout his unbeaten career, also believes that the son of Galileo has improvement still to come.
"He felt as good as ever and is getting more professional with each run," Queally said. "I lost my bit of cover a bit earlier than I would have liked, but he was grown up enough to know that he didn't have to tear off like mad.
"He knows to go when I say go and when I did that, he was electric. He's a horse in a lifetime for the public and for the jockey that's lucky enough to be on him it's a privilege and an honour. I could stand here for hours saying what he means to me.
"There's a lot to look forward to, but who knows what will happen next year. We have to get through the winter first, but if anyone can have him right in the spring it is Sir Henry."
Queally has cultivated a laid-back image during his rise towards the top of his profession over the past three seasons, but his delight at an association that could become as famous as any in recent memory was clear.
"There is pressure of course," he said, "and I'm the one in the centre of it all, but luckily all the debate about the whip took some of it off me this week. I'd like to think that I handle it pretty well and I get a kick out of it. I'm not a stoneface about it all.
"I couldn't pull him up afterwards, it's the same old story. He's as good a horse as you could ever sit on. You can have the best boxer or soccer player or whatever in the world and if they have a head-cold they may not be at their best, but he always is."
It is too early to plot a firm path for Frankel in 2012, though a final run at the Breeders' Cup meeting in Kentucky next month appears to have been all but ruled out. "It will be fairly obvious," Teddy Grimthorpe, racing manager to Frankel's owner Prince Khalid Abdullah, said. "The Lockinge [at Newbury in May] I suppose and then the Queen Anne or the Prince of Wales's Stakes [at Royal Ascot], the Eclipse [at Sandown in July] and the Juddmonte [at York in August]."
Three of those races are over a mile and a quarter, and the hope must be that another two furlongs, in addition to another winter to grow and mature, will turn Frankel into an even more impressive, and impregnable, racehorse.
"We've tried to beat Frankel three times and it has been no different each time," Marco Botti, the trainer of Excelebration, said. "He tried his best, but he was second to a great horse." There will be plenty of other trainers who will echo those words in 2012.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/oct/15/frankel-ascot-champions-day
Tim Cahill European Union Chamonix Yorkshire David Lynch Australasia
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