Frankel

4

Day 343

You are probably asking yourself at this particular moment why the bloodstock industry goes to all this trouble of bringing horses together from all corners of the globe for a physical mating. As you will have gathered, it is a huge and expensive logistical jigsaw. Have they not heard of artificial insemination? If it is good enough for cows, pigs, polo ponies, sheep and just about any other animal or even bird you care to name, why not horses? For goodness sake, we humans have been at it since the London surgeon John Hunter carried out the first documented insemination and subsequent successful birth in the 1770s. As ever with all things horse racing, the answer is, all at once, that complex mixture of tradition, rules, money and hard science.

Tradition is the easy one to tick off. I like the fact that horse racing embraces tradition. Maybe furlongs are today only ever used in ploughing matches and on racecourses, but doesn’t that make it interesting and different? We like our conversations a little odd. Okay, when you say, ‘I got 6–4 about that horse’ a little mental agility is required, but it slips off the tongue better than any metricised 1.5–1. Of course, we could take the bulldozers to the switchback Derby course at Epsom to reduce it to a perfectly flat and uniform oval, but where would be the unique test of the racehorse in that?

If you are thinking, well, I don’t give a damn about tradition, I’m going to be progressive about all this in embracing modern science, then you will find your foal forever excluded from thoroughbred horse racing around the globe which requires all horses to be registered in the General Stud Book. The wording is definitive: ‘Any foal resulting from or produced by the processes of Artificial Insemination, Embryo Transfer or Transplant, Cloning or any other form of genetic manipulation not herein specified, shall not be eligible for registration in The General Stud Book.’ That closes the door on anything produced other than by what the rules call ‘natural service’, as we just witnessed between Galileo and Kind.

Then, of course, there is the money thing. The most productive bulls are inseminating over fifty thousand cows a year each. It doesn’t take a Nobel prize-winning economist to work out the supply and demand implications. Not only would there be a flight to a very few top stallions (only 95,000 thoroughbreds are registered worldwide each year) but the market would entirely collapse for everyone else. It is no exaggeration in saying that thousands of stallions would cease to be. Nobody would want them in physical or test-tube form.

But aside from the money, the flight to a very few stallions would be a slow-burning disaster for the thoroughbred breed. Interbreeding, in horses and animals or even people for that matter (think The Madness of King George), eventually causes the bad, or more correctly recessive, genes to crowd out the good. Within a matter of generations, fewer and fewer foals would reach the racecourse as birth abnormalities became more commonplace. The racehorse as we know it – lithe, fit and fast – that began with those Arabian stallions all those centuries ago, would soon cease to be.

On something of a tangent you might be wondering, as I did, why those recessive genes haven’t taken hold in cattle. Fifty thousand sounds like an awful lot of offspring. Well, it is and it isn’t. There are currently 1.5 billion head of cattle on the planet (the most are in Brazil at 210 million, in case you ask). So, Galileo is fathering about one in 325 of the worldwide crop of foals each year, whereas Toystory, the most productive bull in history with roughly 500,000 calves to his name in nine years (he died in 2014), was producing a ‘mere’ one in 6,000 annually.

An in-foal Kind returned to a different Banstead Manor Stud than the one she had left. Two months on from the bleak of February, spring had come to the Suffolk countryside. The beech trees were in vivid green leaf. Birds were nesting among the hedges that separate the paddocks. The farm tractor was rolling the fields, the broad striped grass adding a certain gaiety to the morning turn out. Kind was paired with Prove in the Blackthorn paddock, a more experienced mare who had raced in France, the two mothers-in-arms with foals to care for inside and out.

Kind had stayed at Coolmore for a while subsequent to her time with Galileo. Two weeks after her covering she was confirmed as pregnant by a scan, an ultrasound that creates that same fuzzy black-and-white photo expectant parents hang on the fridge door. The egg, a single cell about the size of a grain of sand when fertilised by that one spermatozoon, was already multiplying rapidly by division, having spent a restless two weeks in the womb, moving around, until finally fixing itself in one of the horns of the uterus at the end of that first fortnight. A week later, the first heartbeat was detectable.

By the time she had her third scan two further weeks later the miniature foal was visible in outline. Seven weeks after covering, a manual inspection by the vet confirmed all was well. The yolk sac that had sustained the embryo had shrivelled away, the umbilical cord formed, tethering foal to mother. Now was time for Kind, Bullet Train and an embryonic nine-gram Frankel to head for home.

The Victorians liked to term pregnancy as a period of ‘confinement’, as if all activity was to be kept to a bare minimum – if that was the case it certainly didn’t apply to Kind. Or even her kind. Not all broodmares are retired racers – some are still in training, racing for the first third of their gestation. That will be for potentially as long as 100 days, as full term for a horse is generally regarded to be around 340 days or 11 months. And that time was to be spent largely unconfined.

I imagined that the Juddmonte mares, with their valuable cargoes, would be kept in light, airy boxes monitored 24–7 by both people and science. After all, one in five pregnancies don’t end with a live foal. Should there be twins (a rarity in itself at 2.5 per cent of all pregnancies) the chances are grim, with only one in six resulting in the live birth of both foals. But for all the attendant risks, my imagination is way off-beam; Kind and Bullet Train live the life outdoors, in the quiet paddocks that stretch away and out into the far corners of the stud. They are not alone. The Banstead Manor team group-up mares and foals at similar points in their respective lives. It is part social – horses like it that way. If you ever catch a glimpse of the wild ponies on the heather heaths of the New Forest, you will see a similar thing as the herd divides into groups, grazing together with the immediate companions defined by age and disposition. It is also practical; pregnant mares are the adult group most susceptible to infection.

It is hard to make the life of Kind and Bullet Train complicated. It is also hard not to think of it as idyllic as the spring became summer. Long, warm days spent cropping grass. Dozing in the shade. The foals gradually finding their independence. If they want to run, they run. If they want to roll, they roll. Nuzzling. Suckling. Little foals doing that strange hoppy, skippy leap as they run forward and then jump, spring-like, all four feet simultaneously in mid-air before bouncing back down onto the ground. Mother and foal do quite precisely whatever their nature tells them to do. They spend nearly all their time outside; close to twenty-two hours a day. It is a routine that doesn’t change, regardless of the season or the weather. There is no shelter as such, simply high corner panels in each paddock and tree lines that provide protection in the lee of any wind.

Each morning they wait by the gate, not for the dawn but for food. Breakfast is the highlight of the day, followed by a couple of hours in the stable. A chance for the broodmare team to handle the foals. Check on their physical development. Pick up their feet. Trim their hooves. Adjust the collar to a growing head. This is the time to cement that physical bond between man and horse that will be so important through any racing career. Trust is long won. And when the morning routine is over, Bullet Train lies down in the deep, long-stranded oat straw to sleep. But soon it is out again, and if it’s a Friday that is it until Monday; the entire weekend, night and day, will be spent outside. As Ed Murrell so insightfully observes: the stable is entirely a human construct. No horse has, as yet, mastered bricklaying and carpentry.

By the time the centre court at Wimbledon has turned from verdant green to scuffed brown and the final ball of the Championships is struck, Kind’s broodmare group is halved in number. All the foals are weaned and gone. But life carries on much as before. There are few outward signs to suggest the months are marching on, because the foal in the womb grows very slowly in the early stages; by month six most veterinarians will tell you it is no bigger than your average cat. So that is around 10 lb, less than one-twelfth of Frankel’s ultimate birth weight. With Kind due sometime in February, it is around November that the growth spurt begins. As Christmas comes and goes she passes the critical 300-day point; from here on in, the foal is a viable being. Our Frankel is, to all intents and purposes, a horse but no longer in quite such miniature form. Body, legs, head, ears and hooves are all fully formed. The mane and tail are visible. That bay hair we will grow to recognise covers his entire body. Actually, we don’t know he is a ‘he’ at this point, as Juddmonte do not sex test the mares. So make no mistake, the team at Banstead Manor seek out this news at the moment of birth as much as any excited human parent. Like you they have plans to make. Dreams to fulfil. Aspirations. And fears. And doubts. For, despite every technology known to equine science (and believe me, if it exists Juddmonte has it), you will never truly know you have a fit and healthy foal until it lays bloodied and breathing in the straw of the foaling box.

Foaling box number 5 looks much like the other four foaling boxes in the foaling unit at Banstead Manor, except for one thing. It bears a green plaque which reads:

FRANKEL

b.c. Galileo – Kind (Danehill)

Winner of 10 Gr. 1 races and

first unbeaten champion at 2, 3 and 4

Timeform 147

I know that reads like poetry for anyone in the racing game, but not everyone speaks racing. The term ‘b.c.’ is shorthand for bay colt, bay covering a wide spectrum of reddish-brown body hair with a black mane and tail. A colt is an entire, or uncastrated male horse, generally less than five years old. Older than five, an entire male is called a horse and will stay that way unless gelded or used for breeding; in the latter case he becomes a stallion. As you know, Galileo and Kind are Dad and Mum. Danehill is Kind’s father.

‘Gr. 1’ refers to Group 1 races. There is a hierarchy of all racing competitions and Group 1 races stand at the very pinnacle. These are the best races in which the best horses compete. They are to racing what the Grand Slams are to tennis or the Majors are to golf. To even compete in ten is extraordinary. To win ten? Well, that is remarkable.

The fourth line needs some unpicking. ‘First’ seems almost insignificant but put it in context: that is the first horse in the history of European horse racing. So we are talking centuries and millions of horses. Fortunes lost. Dreams busted. Stories of what might have been but for a little bad luck are legion. Such is the enormity of what our about-to-be-born foal will achieve, I’d be tempted to defy the Gods of Fate by adding a little graffiti to the plaque in parentheses: (and only).

‘Unbeaten’. That word is the elixir of sport. Turning great men, women and teams from just being great to being truly great. The comparators by which every performance past, present and future will be measured. Now there have been unbeaten horses in the past, but in truth not many. It is an unusual thing even at the lesser levels of horse racing. That said, some good horses have retired unbeaten, but often they have been whisked away after a handful of races to lock in their stud value rather than test them further. Because so much can go wrong. Injury. Bad luck. Come up against one better on the day. Poor tactics. Feeling a bit under the weather. Just a bad day at the office. We all have them. Horses are no different. But Frankel was and is different, because not only was he unbeaten in the three prime years of any flat racing career but he beat every rival sent out to take him on. And here we are not talking about an average crop; a simply okay generation. Many of Frankel’s contemporaries were brilliant horses in their own right that simply had the misfortune to come up against him. In any other year, in any other era, they would have been the crowned champions. To be the best, you have to beat the best. Frankel was to achieve that in spades, winning even when the cards of fate dealt him the harshest of hands.

And finally ‘Timeform 147’ – that is really a bit of racing techie speak. It’s thanks to Phil Bull, son of a Yorkshire coal miner, schoolteacher turned professional gambler who along the way to amassing a multi-million-pound fortune from betting on the horses created an internationally acknowledged and respected rating system – Timeform – by which all horses, past and present are measured. And 147 is the highest rating ever achieved.

I wish I could tell you something romantic about the moment of Frankel’s birth, maybe coinciding with a beautiful sunrise goldening the sparse countryside of a Suffolk February dawn. But, to be blunt, it was at 11.40 pm. It was dry and 4° C outside. If you like your bed, I don’t recommend working on the foaling unit of a busy stud farm. From January to the second week of May, Simon Mockridge, the then stud manager, Jim Power, the stud groom and Ed Murrell become night owls. They live on the stud farm for good reason, as 90 per cent of foals are born under the cover of darkness, with a majority of those clustered around the two hours either side of midnight. It is, of course, a throwback to the wild when the dark offered respite and protection from predators.

Number 5 foaling box is bigger than the everyday stables, with extra-wide stable doors and, unusually, a small, human-sized door set in the back wall. Around the ceiling are an array of night cameras that monitor every square inch of the stall, the live feed piped back to the office of the night team who have a wall of TV monitors as impressive as any high-security bank vault. Kind may think she is alone, but she isn’t really.

Right up to the last 30 days of the 343 of pregnancy, the team maintained Kind’s routine, out day and night except for that morning interval. Then she became what is termed a ‘heavy mare’, and was brought in at night for those last four weeks. Until the final week of pregnancy, there are not many outward signs of what is happening inside. The mammaries begin to develop six weeks out but even that is not a continuous process, the enlargement plateauing until resuming in the last week. Jim knows her time is fast approaching, as the bags get large and the teats secrete milk the consistency of translucent candle wax. Drops of milk appear, first clear, then thick and creamy. As the foal moves towards the birthing position within the womb, Kind’s belly drops. All the signs are there of an imminent birth, but this time is all about the mare; human contact is kept to an absolute minimum. Kind stands alone in the box. The night crew scan the monitors.

Soon after ten o’clock, Kind starts to become restless, moving around in her box. Dripping milk. She is hot, sweaty and steamy. The uterine contractions are starting. Think of her womb as being the shape of an avocado, with the stem end the birth passage. In the midst is the foal, almost crouched down, hind legs drawn up under his stomach, his rump and tail backed up against the bulbous end. At the front, Frankel’s head is laid on top of his two front legs, nose and hooves together, as if he is preparing to dive out of the stem end. He is ready and so is she. Kind becomes incredibly docile – laid back, as Ed describes it. As she subsides to the ground, her waters break. Jim, Simon and Ed quietly slip in through that back door. Jim is in charge of the delivery; he needs to check the foal. The clock is ticking now. For a successful live birth the foaling must be completed within half an hour. Jim slides his hand inside Kind to feel for two front hooves and a muzzle. All is well.

The second stage of labour is starting, the abdominal muscles exerting more pressure on the womb. It works. Quite suddenly, a single hoof appears. Then a second and then the muzzle. The team are there to gently assist, offering comfort and soothing words but Kind can, and should, do this on her own. There is no hauling at the emerging foal; nature and the mare must do the work. Pushing. Gradually the legs, neck, shoulders and body are out. The hind legs remain in the birth canal for a short while further as Frankel takes his first breath, moving his forelegs like a chick pecking the shell to break open the white amniotic sac, in which he has lived for nearly a year, and that Jim then gently peels away to expose him to the world. The question then hangs in the air among Simon, Jim and Ed: they have a healthy foal, but is it a colt or filly? For at this point they have absolutely no idea. Among the blood and fluid Jim seeks out the answer. Colt! Smiles break out. Knowing nods of congratulation, for, however unfair it might seem, the possibilities for a colt seem so much more than those of a filly. Twelve minutes after her waters have broken, Kind’s foal, the great Frankel, is already a notable being.

Soon she is up on her feet, nuzzling and licking at her foal. Kind is a good mother, recognising her foal by taste and smell. Frankel sits up, taking in his new world – horses see from the moment of birth. And what he sees is a small circle of faces, Jim, Simon and Ed, as he is cleaned and dried. But soon they retreat through the rear door to the office behind, dimming the lights to almost darkness as they go. It is time for mother and foal to bond.

As the guys relaxed with tea and one eye on the monitors after another successful birth, did they speculate that they had just delivered the greatest racehorse of all time? The truth is, and Ed admits this, no. Banstead Manor Stud breeds many beautiful colts and fillies; Frankel was one of thirteen foaled at Banstead that year. But he was more than noteworthy. Beautifully marked with strong colour. This excited Simon – from the very outset he had high hopes. The comments in the birth book show these observations to be more than just braggadocio hindsight. Let me quote in full:

Comment: Quality colt, tall with size and scope. Adequate bone. Slight medial deviation of the left knee. Strong hind leg. Very good foal. Rating: 7+.

In case you are wondering, 7+ is pretty much as good as it gets on the Banstead scale – nobody wants to make him or herself a hostage to fortune. After all, there are plenty of very good foals who don’t necessarily make very good racehorses. But this time, that was to prove one of the greatest understatements in the history of horse racing. It is not always bad to be wrong.

It is coming up to 2 am as Simon heads for his bed; the night team will be on duty until he returns at 7 am. Outside the confines of the foaling unit, nobody in the world knows of Frankel’s arrival and that is the way it shall be until Prince Khalid is told. Reporting the news will be Simon’s first morning task, as across the dawn of Frankel's first day on earth and several continents, the wires hum.