Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Simon Cooper 2020

Images © individual copyright holders

Race card © Racing Post

Cover image © CARL COURT/Stringer/Getty Images

Simon Cooper asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008307035

Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008307059

Version: 2020-06-02

Dedication

Mum

Sorry I didn’t finish in time.

Epigraph

‘And Allah took a handful of southerly wind,

blew His breath over it, and created the horse.’

Bedouin legend

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraph

6  Contents

7  Prologue

8  1 Genetic alchemy

9 2 A certain kindness

10  3 Creation day

11  4 Day 343

12  5 More Irish than English

13  6 The Pick

14  7 In training for training

15  8 A horse by a very special name

16  9 Warren Place

17  10 Getting into his head

18  11 The 6.35 at Newmarket

19  12 Intensive training

20  13 Economical with the actualité

21  14 Winter dreaming

22  15 Leading from the front

23  16 Arise Sir Henry

24  17 Duel on the Downs

25  18 The high-stakes gamble

26  19 Hidden dips

27  20 Flying the standard

28  21 Always summer

29  22 The end of days

30  Epilogue

31  The Newmarket 11

32  Keeneland to fenland

33  A six-figure loss

34  Last man standing

35  The worst Derby runner ever?

36  Up in the air

37  A 99 per cent write-down

38  The cruellest cut

39  All-weather man

40  Pinhooked

41  Scandal

42  Shadow man

43  Acknowledgements

44  The Frankel File

45  Pedigree

46  Race record

47  Timeline

48  Awards

49  Frankel by numbers

50  Picture Section

51  Bibliography

52  Index

53  About the Author

54  About the Publisher

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Prologue

In horse racing, greatness is defined by speed. Being the second fastest counts for little. You have to win. And win. And keep on winning until every challenger of your generation is put to the sword. Such a thing so rarely happens that most people pass through life without the privilege of seeing such an animal. Occasionally a contender will arrive, burning up the turf until the dream of greatness is shattered in defeat; that precious cloak of invincibility torn to shreds by another.

On a rainy Suffolk evening, did our locally trained bay colt have any idea that he was about to embark on that path to the ultimate in racing greatness? To become the one against which all horses of the past, present and future would be judged and likely fall short. Let’s face it, he probably didn’t.

In truth, despite the remote possibility of such a thing, he had a whisper of a chance; he was bred if not to be great then at least to be fast. But that counts for only so much. Hundreds of thoroughbred racehorses debut each season with bloodlines as good as our horse. But breeding will only take you so far; the rest lies deep within, far beyond human intervention.

If you’d been a casual observer among the thousands gathered at Newmarket races on 13 August 2010, the third race of the night didn’t promise very much. In fact, it was a meeting far removed from the highest rank, designed more to draw a big holiday crowd than for quality racing. It was one of those humdrum, unregarded workaday fixtures which are the bread and butter of horse racing around the globe – excepting one horse.

You probably didn’t bother to go to the paddock after the second race to watch the horses parade for the next; few did. What was meant to be a balmy summer evening had turned cold with squally-soon-to-become-heavy rain. Trainers, jockeys, stable hands and officials were all scurrying around truncating the preliminaries to the shortest possible duration. The lawns in front of the stands were pretty well deserted; the crowds were jammed inside. A few hardy types sheltered under umbrellas to be close to the horses, but in truth they were few and far between. After all, this was just a minor race with a dozen horses, eight of which had never raced before and the remaining four had hardly set the world alight, without a win between them.

For our horse, this was to be his racecourse debut; he was one of that eight. But was he the special one? Maybe. There was a buzz about him. He’d lit up the training gallops. Been the gossip of this racing town. He’d been named in honour of one of the greatest trainers of modern times. Expectations were high. A sick man, his trainer, was being rejuvenated just by his very being. But this was a wretched night; his stable hand had even lost his shoe in the quagmire leading up to the start. If it all went wrong, there were at least excuses to hand.

By the time you’d extracted yourself from the bar, placed a bet and found a vantage point in the stands, the horses would have been long gone, gathered at the start a mile away. Without high-powered binoculars they would have been nothing more than a wet smudge on the otherwise empty horizon of Newmarket Heath that doubles as a racecourse. With binoculars you’d have seen jockeys hating the rain, crouched over their horses, keeping them calm with a circling routine. Had you been at the start, you would have heard the starter’s assistant complete the roll call as the handlers stepped forward to lead each horse in turn into the designated compartment of the starting stalls. A moment later, the loading complete, the gates of the stalls would spring open. The race was on.

Did our horse lead from pillar to post, leaving all others struggling in his wake, the rain-sodden crowd gasping in awe at his performance? I’d like to tell you yes, but it wasn’t really that way. In a race that lasts less than two minutes – this was just a mile – a quick getaway helps. But our young blood blew it. Months of training counted for nothing as this critical moment vanished in a trice. He was closer to last than first with half the race run. Had you placed a bet on him – he was the favourite, after all – you might have had reason to worry. But really you need not have done. Our horse was a cut above the rest. He knew it. And you, too, would know it soon.

He had been trained to run this way. He was headstrong. A horse who knew his mind but was prone to run too fast, too soon. His trainer, the best of the best, saw this in him so taught him the value of patience. The waiting game. Cruising behind the others until the moment was right. And that is how this race has become a part of horse-racing history.

In the wet gloom, as the track rose towards the finishing line, the jockey eased our horse out from behind the pack to make his run. There was nothing hurried. Really, there was nothing to doubt. He drew level with the leaders, kept time with them for a few strides as if to make some point before pulling away with ease as the winning post flashed by. Whether you were a seasoned racing professional or a once-a-year punter, our horse would have caught the eye. ‘Impressive’, you’d have said. ‘Very impressive.’ And you’d have logged the name of our horse in that part of your brain reserved for something out of the ordinary.

One hundred and three seconds on from the start, the horse drawn in stall ten had passed the winning post ahead of the rest. That was to become something of a habit as Frankel was now, despite the apparent inauspiciousness of the occasion, on his way to becoming the greatest racehorse to ever live.

1

Genetic alchemy

Yesterday I met Frankel who crept up on me all of a sudden. One moment I was deep in conversation and the next I sensed a presence behind me. Maybe someone said something along the lines of ‘here’s the man’. In truth, I don’t recall precisely but when I turned around there he was: the greatest racehorse that has ever strode out on God’s turf.

As I wended my way across the Cambridge fens, which in turn gave way to the ordered horse paddocks that surround Newmarket, I tried not to elevate this meeting to something of a semi-religious experience. An audience with the Pope. A pilgrimage to a Tibetan mountaintop to meet the Dalai Lama. It seemed the wrong side of sane to equate a horse on such a level.

And indeed that is true. But rarely in life does one ever get to meet the truly great. They are the stuff of legends. Stories passed down through generations. The prism of time only giving us a hint of what the truth may have been. But here was I doing that very thing. A chance to look, see and touch. Make a judgement all of my own. To burn into my memory a horse that will likely never, ever exist again.

You’d barely give Frankel’s home a second glance if you drove past. Yes, the sweeping turn to the entrance looks immaculate, but the redbrick walls are low and the signs discreet. Beyond the gates that swing open to acknowledge your arrival, the scene that greets you appears to be anything other than a horse stud farm.

The smooth tarmac gives way to immaculately raked gravel that scrunches under my tyres. In the absence of signs, a kindly gardener points me in the right direction, curving me around the tall copper beech that was hiding the offices. Well, these are not offices in the absolute sense of the word, but rather the most magnificent country house, known as Banstead Manor Stud, that people just happen to work in. It is the European headquarters of the world-famous racing and breeding operation, Juddmonte, owned by His Highness Prince Khalid bin Abdullah bin Abdulrahman Al Saud, known universally across racing as Mr Khalid Abdullah, befitting his privacy and pursuit of excellence. I honestly don’t know if Juddmonte’s Banstead Manor was designed by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, but it has all the heritage. Long, horizontal, thin red bricks delineated by perfectly trowelled lime mortar. Tall, slender chimneys, artworks in their own right. Narrow windows that mimic the first Elizabethan age. I’m ushered into a rather grand room which is full of Frankel memorabilia; even the mints are wrapped in his racing colours. Among the paintings and prints is a faded handwritten letter from a son to his mother in old-fashioned copperplate script. It seems Frankel is not the only one to achieve world fame to have lived at Banstead Manor; this was the childhood home of Winston Churchill.

I’m met by Shane Horan who is introduced to me with a job title I’ve never heard spoken of before, but that speaks more to my ignorance in these matters than the title itself: Nominations Manager. He is, it transpires, responsible for which mares are chosen each season (requests to mate with Frankel are significantly oversubscribed). We sit down in what I guess would once have been the drawing room, with furniture as comfortable today as it would have been back when this was a grand home. Reclining on the sofa, I have a glorious view across a York stone terrace, striped lawns, and between the house and yet another copper beech, a statue of a full-sized horse on a Portland stone plinth. I hazard a guess that it might just be Frankel. I am correct.

I pull out my pad and start to ask Shane a few questions, but we both know that really I am being polite. Seeing Frankel is the thing. The answers will come later. We are just playing for time. Soon Shane looks at his watch, stands up, and beckons me to follow. ‘We’ll just catch him on the way back.’ It is shortly before 3 pm but I’m none the wiser as to where Frankel has been or where he is going. I don’t like to ask, as the assumption seems to be that I should know.

My other assumption was that I’ll need a pair of wellington boots to tramp around, or at least make my way to the stud yard. Shane gives me a quizzical look when I ask whether I should change footwear. I’ll take that as a no. The walk to the stables is both short and perfection. Another striped lawn gently slopes away from the house. A small lake gurgles as a pulsing fountain spouts water. The yew hedges are geometrically precise. Gertrude Jekyll, Lutyens’ landscape gardener of choice, would most definitely have approved of the splendid herbaceous borders, the flock of colours rising from low at the front to tall at the back. Less than a hundred yards from the house, Shane swings open a small gate and beyond the shiny, black-painted tubular steel of the estate fencing is more striped lawn, specimen trees, soft pale shingle pathways and three turreted stable blocks.

Disabuse yourself that this is any ordinary stable block; if there was a star rating for horse accommodation this would be seven star plus a bit more. The original building, that houses just two horses, repeats the brickwork of the house, with dark-wood stained stable doors at either side adorned with solid brass catches and bolts. In the centre a corbelled arch leads to a white-painted door, slightly knocked and careworn by daily stud life, with the tack and feed store beyond. The slate roof is topped by two jaunty looking turrets, which serve as ventilation shafts, each of which is capped by what you might easily mistake for a black pointed witch’s hat. The shafts, a sort of forerunner to air conditioning, were by all accounts originally installed by army engineers who were billeted in the stables during World War II, and the style has been replicated with the three later stable blocks, perfect facsimiles both, with housing for eight stallions in total. This is, and has been for the past six years, Frankel’s home.

There is most definitely a sense of theatre leading up to meeting the equine who is often termed, with no sense of anything other than the truth, the wonder horse. In turn, I am shown stallions Bated Breath, Kingman and Oasis Dream who are led out of their respective stalls for my perusal. Privileged though I am to see them, I do feel a bit of a fraud. If you are a keen follower of horse racing, and breeding in particular, those names will leap from the page. For me, just starting my equine genetic education, they are simply the most beautiful specimens in the prime of life, living in the most splendid surroundings. In time I’ll piece it all together, but for now, without wishing to diminish them in any way, they are the amuse-bouche.

As I turned to see Frankel for the first time, he was most definitely different to the others but perhaps not quite as I imagined. While the first three had variously danced on their toes, squiggled their ears, held heads high, eyes darting to every person and chewing on the brass chain that connects leading rein to head collar, along came Frankel, head bowed down. There was no fuss. No ceremony. I would say he sauntered up to me, but that suggests a levity of demeanour which is not him at all. He moved with considered purpose. Each stride was for a reason, delivering one foot in front of the other with an economy of effort. Pausing at the required spot as if to say, I’m not going to move further unless it is absolutely necessary. But don’t mistake this for laziness. Here was a horse who was alert to everything and everybody around him.

He took to my scratching at the white star on his forehead in good part. Just patting him on the neck seemed rather inadequate; too small and fleeting a gesture to connect with this great beast. He kept his head slightly bowed as we went eye-to-eye. I slid my hand down the front of his face, tracing the line of his blaze, the white hairs that narrow then widen again just as the coat gives way to the soft, dark skin of the muzzle. Warm breath gently exhaled from his nostrils, the steady beat of breathing pacing out the comfortable moments between us. There was a slight damp odour in the air, but not unpleasant. Oats and hay maybe? As I jiggled my fingers around his wet mouth, we ended up playing a little game as he twisted his lips as if to capture a stray piece of my hand. Until, quite suddenly, without breaking eye contact, he nudged my hand away. The game was over.

For Rob Bowley, his stallion man, had just produced the most enormous carrot. However potentially tasty my fingers might have been, carrots were clearly a known quantity in Frankel’s life. It is fair to say, he was not a tidy eater. As he bit, crunched and chewed his way through this industrial-sized vegetable, a pool of carrot juice and orange-coloured pulp, certainly enough to fulfil one of your five-a-day, gathered at his feet. So intent on eating, he didn’t seem to notice the brief arrival of the stud cat George who sidled over to sniff, then reject, a possible windfall. That said, George and Frankel go back a long while, as the cat arrived at Banstead just a month before the horse, though the pedigree of the latter was considerably more certain than that of the former. George just appeared from nowhere, the grey tabby taking up residence without so much as a by-your-leave. Despite much asking around the village nobody ever claimed him so, as the Frankel express has thrilled ever faster, George had been along for the ride, elbowing his way into photoshoots and among film crews. I’m not sure Frankel liked sharing the limelight, for he studiously ignored George, as all the while I stood at his head he kept me fixed in his gaze, those dark brown eyes giving nothing away.

And that is what I recall most about my first meeting with Frankel. Not his impressive frame. Not his beautiful home. But his eyes. They followed the unknown quantity, in this case me, everywhere. Rob, Shane and all the other Banstead people – Frankel had locked them away deep inside that head of his. But of the new, he was curious. Something to be sized up, evaluated and considered. As Frankel was wheeled away and he gave me one last sidelong glance, it was hard not to come to the conclusion that he had been judging me more than I had been judging him. It was an odd and slightly perplexing sensation. He is, after all, only a horse but I felt I had undergone some sort of benediction.

Once Frankel was gone everyone definitely relaxed – now that is odd – as the conversation turned to his daily regime. The question in my mind was soon answered without me ever having to ask it – Frankel was on the way back from his 3 pm covering. Or to put it in layman’s terms, a mating with one of the 150 or so mares that would be visiting with him from mid-February (breeders with some sense of humour commence the season the day after St Valentine’s Day) until mid-June. If you are starting to do the maths to conclude that is a lot of covers in not a lot of time, you’d be right. Plus you have to account for some multiple covers of the same mare to ensure success. So, at the moment of my mid-afternoon meeting, Frankel was only just past the halfway point in his day with 7 am, 3 pm and 9 pm appointments in his daily diary. Great genes are in great demand.

Today Frankel is ten and has spent the greater part of his adult life at Banstead Manor Stud in Suffolk. Indeed, this was where he was born, but his story really starts 400 miles due west in another horse county of another horse country. County Tipperary in Ireland.

There is a fine motorway that takes you from Cork in the direction of Dublin. It’s very twenty-first century with wide lanes and tolls; maybe it is the latter that discourages traffic because it seemed very empty to me. But the moment you turn off to follow the signs to Fethard, you are in old Ireland. The lanes are narrow. The stone walls in need of repair. Topped with hedges interspersed with ragged barbed-wire fencing. You would never call the rural architecture that plots your journey beautiful. The grey, squat, rectangular bungalows are built with practicality rather than beauty in mind, often juxtaposed by the adjacent farmyards that seem to have been forever falling down awaiting a wave of gentrification that may never arrive.

And pretty soon you are in Fethard. The roads are potholed. Shops are boarded up. This seems like a bit of Ireland still awaiting the arrival of the Celtic tiger. But you can’t help but smile at the sign on the wall outside the bar: McCarthy’s est. 1840. Publican. Restaurant. Undertaker. One of Ireland’s oldest unchanged pubs. If that doesn’t arrest the progress of a hungry traveller nothing will, though the slight carbolic smell that hangs over the town is disconcerting. Here is a place where peat is still burned as the fuel of choice.

On, through and out the other side of Fethard and suddenly twenty-first-century Ireland seems to be back, but with a twist of rural chic. Instead of just driving down a road you appear to be driving down an avenue. The verges are trimmed. The hedges cut box-straight, lined on the field side with gradually maturing trees planted perfectly parallel to the road, and beyond that post and rail fences delineating paddocks. Even the farm gates are a cut above your usual rural offering, with sweeping turn-ins and fancy stone pillars. Helpful signs direct you off the road to such-and-such farm or so-and-so stud. Occasionally, you catch a glimpse of a group of mares and their foals.

If Banstead Manor was the last word in understated stud luxury, then Coolmore Stud is something very different. That is not to say it is not smart; witness the mile-and-a-half ‘avenue’ approach which has brought me to their door, the entrance more akin to a small European palace than a working stud farm. But it is unashamedly commercial. In the world of breeding, it is rivalled only, at least in numerical terms, by Godolphin, the name that covers the racing and breeding interests of Sheikh Mohammed and the famous all-blue Godolphin racing colours.

The scale and spread of Coolmore is, in every sense of the word, awesome. As I was driven around (covering 7,000 acres, you don’t walk) I have to confess to frequently suffering from information overload. It really is quite something to take in, but here are the salient facts of how it has become what it is today. Coolmore is owned by the Magnier family, but its origins lie with Battle of Britain fighter pilot Tim Vigors who, having been demobbed from the Royal Air Force, came to Ireland to work as a bloodstock auctioneer then agent, and inherited Coolmore, which was at the time just 350 acres. It was here he set about establishing the stud in 1968.

At that time, seven miles away across the fields at Ballydoyle, Vincent O’Brien was hitting the prime of his flat training career, along with jockey Lester Piggott, with a string of great horses. Sir Ivor, Nijinsky, Roberto, and The Minstrel come immediately to mind. If those names don’t mean much to you, don’t worry. It is possibly just enough to know that they were Derby winners all, the most prestigious race on the planet, in a ten-year purple patch that ran from the same year Vigors set up shop. And this success initially came within the partnership of Vigors, O’Brien and football pools magnate (a huge UK national gambling pastime until it was first decimated by the National Lottery and then put out of its misery by the internet), Robert Sangster.

But Coolmore wasn’t just a breeder, it was a buyer of bloodstock, in the early years supplementing European bloodlines with North American horses, especially the offspring of Canadian sire Northern Dancer who just happens to be Frankel’s great-grandfather. You might now have a clue where this is all going. At the time, Coolmore was not the only one to recognise the value of this particular sire, leading to epic showdowns in the sales ring as it went head-to-head with the Arab buyers in the bloodstock boom of the 1980s. This resulted in the first eight-figure sum ever paid for a horse when a yearling, who was subsequently named Snaafi Dancer, sold in 1983 for $10.2 million ($25.1 million in today’s money), bought by Sheikh Mohammed. If you are assuming he went on to do great things, you’ll be disappointed. Sent into training in England, this colt was considered too slow to even race, and attempts to harvest the genes of his father failed; in two years at stud, with all sorts of fertility problems, he sired just four offspring, three of which won minor races. It is said that he ended his days eating grass in a Florida paddock.

Not to be outdone, the Coolmore syndicate went higher still two years later, paying $13.1 million ($29.8 million adjusted in real terms) for the son of Nijinsky (who himself was the son of Northern Dancer), making him the most expensive yearling ever sold at public auction. This story had a slightly happier ending as Seattle Dancer, as he was named, without ever being considered a world beater, won some good races for Vincent O’Brien and competed against some of the best. He retired to become a Coolmore stallion standing in the USA, Ireland, Japan and finally Germany until his death in 2007 at twenty-three years of age.

So evolved this powerful triumvirate: Sangster provided the cash, Coolmore the raw material and O’Brien the training expertise. It is a model that many have copied since, admittedly rarely with this scale of success. Three decades on, the essential template persists, though with some subtle changes. John Magnier is now the sole owner of Coolmore. As the son-in-law of Vincent O’Brien, and previously a successful fourth-generation National Hunt breeder at the nearby Castlehyde Stud, Magnier has over time bought the interests of Vigors, O’Brien and Sangster. However, the connection with Ballydoyle remains, where Aidan O’Brien took over in 1996 following the retirement of Vincent in 1994 (the two are not related), training the Coolmore homebreds and purchases.

During the writing of this book, you may not be surprised to learn that I visited all manner of horse farms, studs, stables and training yards across countries and continents. And the one thing I will always take away from them all is an immense feeling of calm. Away from the hustle and bustle of the racecourse, horses lead the most perfectly ordered lives. Everything, wherever possible, is refined down to routine and peacefulness. When you pass through the gates of any horse establishment, the world as most people know it is left behind. Time exists at the pace that suits the horses. The animals come first. People come second. Once the daily chores are over, the horses settled and the stable hands departed for breakfast or a well-deserved afternoon nap, human activity is supplanted by stillness. Horse heads hang over the stable doors quietly, watching very little. If you happen to pass through the yard, you might hear the grating grind from somewhere deep inside a dim-lit stall as a mouthful of hay is chewed as much for its properties as a calming balm as for its food value. Or the slurping sucking of water through tightened lips. Occasionally, a steel-shod hoof scrapes against a concrete floor or bangs against the wooden door, drawing disapproving glances from the neighbours. But that is about it. The biggest excitement might be a flock of doves whistling by or the stable cat on patrol.

Somehow, I think that is what draws people into the horse business and captures their hearts forever. There is a wonderful other-worldliness about caring for these highly-bred thoroughbreds who are, once you strip away the speed and contest of the racing, calm, benign and content.

I say all this because you might expect Coolmore, with its giant scale and financial heft, to be anything other than this. At the height of the breeding season, in addition to the fifteen resident stallions, there will be in the region of 900 resident mares. Just under half will be there with a foal, while the others will be in foal, at some stage from conception to pre-birth, or there being readied for one of the stallions. They are attended by a huge team: nine vets, three farriers – you can imagine how this list goes on. It even includes an acupuncturist. In all, 380 staff work at Coolmore, and that takes no account of the US operation in Kentucky and the Australian stud in the Hunter Valley.

But big really does, in this case at least, mean beautiful. As far as the eye can see, life is dedicated to the horses; railed paddocks and green pastures. In the far distance, the ridged peaks of the Galtees, Ireland’s highest inland mountain range, provide shelter from the worst of the weather, ensuring a temperate climate. For Coolmore, along with the myriad of horse studs and farms, from the one-man bands to the truly huge, are all clustered around the Rock of Cashel in Tipperary because of nature not man. We might have named this the Golden Vale, but it was the Ice Age that gave us the right to call it that, leaving behind as it did a land of limestone from which grows the most perfect turf.

You don’t need to see it to know it – just walk on it. It might not feel like the soft lawns of Banstead Manor. In fact, it slightly scrunches underfoot as the aroma of wild thyme, basil and marjoram is released by your footfalls. It is said that a square metre of this calcareous grassland contains forty species of native flowering plants, which along with the butterflies, insects, curlews and skylarks, thrive with the chalky soil. And for growing foals and broody mares, what could be better than picking at calcium-rich grass?

Coolmore is not ordered in the sense that the paddocks are in regimented lines. Nor are the connecting roads Roman straight. Each stable yard is not a cookie-cutter creation of the next. I assume this is because Coolmore has evolved over four decades. And for that, it has a certain charm. Humpbacked stone bridges cross little limestone streams. Wiggly lines of mature horse chestnut trees and hawthorn bushes decorate the landscape. Ponds have gathered in low-lying ground. The buildings range from spartan utility to perfectly formed yards in quiet, out-of-the-way corners. As you travel around, I’d be tempted to say everywhere you look there are horses. But that is not altogether true.

For of all the things I didn’t expect to see at Coolmore were cattle; there are more white, large-muscled Charolais, black Aberdeen Angus and the white and brown Simmental beef animals than you might imagine, all mixed in with the mares and foals, sharing the same paddocks and grass. That said, there does seem to be a certain demarcation within each enclosure, with a small herd of cattle, maybe six or eight in all, and a similar numbered harras of horses. Without any suggestion of animosity, they appear to be keeping to very separate groups. So you might wonder, as did I, if they don’t offer any companionship why they are there at all? For surely it can’t be economic; the cattle, even if they run to a few hundred in number across the stud, can’t be worth in aggregate more than a single mare or foal. The answer lies in land management. Horses are horribly fussy eaters of pasture. Look at a field grazed by cattle or sheep and it will be lawn-like; evenly cropped. But a horse paddock will be an unsightly patchwork of the tightly eaten, the almost bare, rank looking tall grass and thrusting weeds. Cattle on the other hand eat it all, keeping the grass both healthy and fertile.

After shock of the incongruity, the cattle soon become part of the scenery; it is really the groups of foals and mares that draw the eye. If you thought the idyll Anna Sewell describes in the opening chapter of Black Beauty was fantasy, think again: ‘While I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass. In the daytime I ran by her side, and at night I lay down close by her.’ This picture-book tale of contented mothers, in the bloom of maternity, letting long-legged foals suckle, idly wafting tails to disperse the first few flies of spring, actually exists. The groups of six or eight are loosely circled both for companionship and out of some long-inherited knowledge that they are safer when in together. Occasionally, a brave foal wanders to the periphery, but a single look or a low snort will draw it back into the fold. The foals are mostly still young – a few days to a few months – and their coats raggedy, with clumps of hair, in contrast to the smooth sheen of the mothers. In time that will change. For now the world offers the sort of great adventures only a young foal would appreciate within the confines of a paddock: fluttering butterflies, buzzing bees and overly bold crows who strut from one fresh horse hoof divot to the next in search of newly exposed worms.

As with Banstead Manor, my trip to Coolmore is part research, part reveal; that moment when I’m presented with the thing I have come to see. Leaving the paddocks, mares and foals, you cross into what might best be described as the inner sanctum. The holy of holies. The place where this story really begins: at the stable of a horse called Galileo, Frankel’s father.

As you approach, the security is discreet but impressive. Twenty-four-hour-a-day guards monitor every arrival and departure. Cameras look upon you. Gates glide open. There is something a little James Bond about it all as the driveway welcomes you, lined with statues of the Coolmore greats. It might seem a little over the top, but behind these gates lie assets. Though they may be in horseflesh form, that is indeed what they are: as valuable as currency, diamonds or works of art, demanding the same level of protection. You think I’m exaggerating? You’ll see.

If, as a horse, you ever had the chance to determine your own paternity, you’d likely choose Galileo. He is the supreme stallion of his generation. In recent history, he might only have been bettered by his father Sadler’s Wells. In the future, he might be bettered by his son Frankel. But I suspect you, along with most others, would be happy to pick him as your father for now. As part of the Northern Dancer dynasty (you recall he was Sadler’s Wells’s father) Galileo was born to be great, but as you might also recall from the auction duds, this does not always turn out to be so. But in his particular case, genetics came up trumps. In a short but explosive career, he was the horse that carried nearly all before him. He raced just once as a two-year-old, slaughtering a field of his contemporaries right at the butt end of the season by fourteen lengths. This began a run of six consecutive wins that continued into the following year when he won the Derby, Irish Derby and King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes. In Europe, as a three-year-old, it is difficult to win a trio of races any better than that, but when he tried to make it seven in a row he tasted his first defeat in the Irish Champion Stakes at Leopardstown before heading to the United States for the Breeders’ Cup Classic, the most valuable race of his life. But whether it was the travelling or racing on the dirt surface for the first time, Galileo’s racing career closed on its 364th day when he came sixth and was retired to stud. That has turned out to be a very wise decision.

My first meeting with Galileo is altogether more friendly than with his famous son. Maybe that’s just a reflection of age; the young buck versus the sage old man. For at just past twenty years of age, Galileo is getting on a bit these days. Perhaps he has mellowed. His groom Noel Stapleton tells me he is incredibly laid back and easy to handle. No quirks. No oddities. Just a particular love of having his teeth and gums rubbed. He arrives in the yard wearing an anonymous green, waterproof horse blanket, with piped red edging. It is early April. The days are still chilly and damp. The trees still bare. Galileo likes to keep dry and warm. It is hardly a big ask for one so valuable.

As Noel goes to strip off the blanket, I feel tempted to say don’t bother. Let the old man be. But Galileo seems up for the inspection. Clearly he doesn’t know how little I know as he pricks his ears, looks me in the eye and nods his head in my direction as if by way of greeting. I keep silent as this amazing stallion is exposed, because I know I really want to see Galileo in the raw. Measure him in my mind against his son. Or maybe I should be measuring the son against the father?

My immediate thought is that Galileo is a bigger horse than Frankel, even though they both stand a shade over 16 hands high. That is, translated into more normal measurement, 65 inches (a hand is 4 inches, an ancient measure based on the breadth of a male hand) taken from the ground beside front leg to the top of the withers, the ridge between the shoulder blades. But the size thing is a marginal difference, for in many respects they are so much the same, though the son is more muscled than the father, but again like demeanour that might just be as much about age as physique. True, Frankel has four white socks (well, that’s what it says on his passport, but really it is three and a half because one is a rather indistinct sock) and his father just the one. Otherwise they are both bays, coats a reddish-brown colour with black mane, tail, insides of the ears and lower legs from just above the knees. Both have those distinctive white stars on their foreheads, though it is Galileo that has the most pronounced, with a more obvious blaze.

As with Frankel, I have the insistent urge to do more than just rub my hand along the horse that had sired not only the greatest racehorse ever but a plethora of other champions. Being petted and handled is almost in the DNA of thoroughbreds; from the very first day of birth it is something they become accustomed to. In fact, they almost expect it. Good horse handlers make a point of it. It becomes a conditioned response for both horse and human. So I take Noel’s tip and rub Galileo’s gums. It is true, he really does like it. And like many a horse he revels in the attention, though what he thinks of the meaningless babble of words I mutter, I do not know. But he takes it all in good part. It has happened thousands of times before, and will, God willing, happen thousands of times again. But, and we have to be realistic, he is coming towards the end of a truly epic life at stud.

Winning two Derbies is an impressive achievement by any measure, but if we are being truthful Galileo would only just make it into the list of the top one hundred racehorses of all time. His short burst of a racing career, allied with that famous bloodline, would suggest at the outset solid and successful years at stud. But horse genes are a peculiar thing.

We will be back to see Galileo again, but for now let us savour where he stands just past his twentieth birthday. As we all know, Frankel is his most famous son, but even if you took him out of the equation, Galileo would still reign as the supreme stallion. Since he first came to Coolmore in 2001, he has sired 2,743 foals, 2,089 of which reached the racecourse winning 3,868 races all over the world, amassing total prize money of £177,088,490.* And as I stood beside him on that greyish April day, he didn’t seem to have any inclination to stop. In the previous season, he had been the leading sire in Great Britain and Ireland, eclipsing his nearest rival (the title is determined by racecourse earnings, in this case £13,663,938) by a factor of three. His roster of great sons and daughters, many of them now successful at stud themselves, would take up more pages than this book has to spare; his stud record (i.e. every significant race his children have won or been placed in) on the Coolmore website runs to fifty-seven pages. Suffice to say, there is barely a major race anywhere on the globe that the Galileo progeny haven’t won, in many cases more than once, including three Derby winners, winners of all five of the English Classics and in one year the first three home in continental Europe’s premier race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.

All this, as you might imagine, comes at a price. If you visited that same Coolmore website to see exactly how much you will have to pay, you are going to be disappointed: the stud fee for the current year is marked as private. But the rumour is €600,000. That is to say, over half a million pounds to have your already valuable mare mated with Galileo. And you will not be the only one. Galileo will ‘cover’, as they like to call it in the business, around 150 mares in the breeding season. Forget your Cristiano Ronaldos, LeBron James, Lionel Messis, Roger Federers and Lewis Hamiltons of this world, for Galileo leaves them puffing in his wake. With an annual income of close to £80 million (some of his progeny have been foal shares), he has been one of the highest earning and most valuable sporting athletes on the planet in recent times. And if you think your cheque book will be enough to guarantee visiting rights, think again. Each year over three hundred applications are made for the available places.

But when I see Galileo, do these figures tumble through my mind? Not a bit of it. All I see is a horse completely at ease with himself and with people who love him for what he is. A truly magical creature, the equine incarnation of genetic alchemy, who continues to sow the seeds to an ever-growing dynasty. And who knows, maybe another Frankel?

* Foals’ figure to 2017. Other figures to 2016.

2

A certain kindness

Another Frankel? What are the chances? Realistically speaking, infinitesimally slim, but maybe even more slim than we might ever imagine, even though the thoroughbred you see striding out on the racecourse is very much the product of man.

As a nation we started riding horses in the seventh century; up to then horses were beasts of burden carrying loads, pulling carts or, in the time of Boudicca, war horses powering chariots. By the early 600s, it was considered a matter of status to appear on horseback, with the riders largely confined to those of the first rank of a society still adjusting itself after the departure of the Romans. Wind forward three centuries and the first mention of racehorses appears, called at the time ‘running horses’, and were so well regarded that Athelstan, the tenth-century king of England, passed a law prohibiting their export. However, the owners were not blind to the benefits of new bloodlines and started importing stallions from the continent, a process that was inevitably accelerated a century later in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings and the arrival of William the Conqueror from France.

So the sport of racing evolved, largely under the patronage of royalty, noblemen and the well-to-do. But it wasn’t always smooth. Oliver Cromwell banned racing in England, dissolving the Royal Stud at Tutbury, disposing of both Charles I and his 140 horses, though the latter were sold, meeting a better fate than their master. Happily the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 marked the restoration of horse racing, for in the new king Charles II the English had an enthusiast for the sport. He hosted races at his park at Windsor before establishing Newmarket as the place to be devoted to horse racing, running his own horses and putting up prize money with silver trophies. With this royal imprimatur, racing as we know it today was on its way and the emergence of the thoroughbred as a specific breed of horse was just around the corner.

The word thoroughbred is not unique to horses; it is often used to refer to somebody or something of outstanding quality. However, in the context of horses, with the T capitalised, it denotes a very particular hybrid of the breed. The Thoroughbred has a specific genetic make-up, with all the unique characteristics of agility and speed that flow from that. It has been bred for a singular purpose – racing – which sets it apart from other horses, in the same way that say the Shetland pony or the Shire horse have become deft at the tasks for which they have been bred over the centuries. However, while the Shetland is a product of island isolation, the Thoroughbred came about due to a very different set of circumstances, both at the same time deliberate and accidental.

The deliberate was the arrival of three stallions from the Middle East over a period of forty years from the 1690s, imported to breed with the native mares to produce ‘bigger, tougher, stouter and faster racehorses’ as Binns and Morris, authors of the definitive book Thoroughbred Breeding, succinctly put it. The accidental is how Byerley Turk, the first of those three, arrived in England to take up his stud duties. You might imagine that a party was dispatched to the Arabian Desert to track down nomadic Bedouin tribes. In a windswept tent, among ever-shifting dunes the adventurers would, over sweetened tea, parlay gold or some such into horseflesh before making the long and arduous journey home with this newly prized stallion. It would be quite the adventure; reminiscent of Indiana Jones. But the truth even out-Hollywoods Hollywood.

The Turk, as he tends to be known for reasons that will become apparent, was foaled in the Balkans in 1679 and, as the story goes, was adopted by a near-penniless groom who saw in him great potential and the chance to escape to make a new life for the both of them. So, having trained this young horse in the art of warfare, the pair made their way to Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of the Ottoman Empire, where they joined the Turkish cavalry. By way of the Siege of Vienna, the Turk, along with his groom, ended up in June 1686 as a military charger protecting the Hungarian capital of Buda (now Budapest), a Turkish conquest since the sixteenth century, in yet another siege. The odds against their side, the Turks, winning were slim: they numbered 7,000 soldiers with the massed ranks of the European army, including the British, somewhere close to 100,000. By the end of the summer, Buda had fallen and the Turk along with his groom were captured by a group of English aristocrats who brought them back to England.

At this point, we don’t exactly know how the dark brown colt came into the ownership of Captain Robert Byerley. Some say he purchased him in London; others that he was himself at the Siege of Buda. But regardless, the Turk’s fighting days were far from over. Byerley was a professional soldier with a horse to match. The two were in service together, and when the time came he rode his war horse to Ireland in opposition to the Jacobites. But it wasn’t all skirmishes and battles. They stopped along the way to win a contest at Downpatrick Races, before the pair went to war one last time at the Battle of the Boyne. And it is only at this point that the Byerley Turk truly becomes part of our story, because whether it was out of sentimentality or a recognition that he was something special, Captain Byerley retired his stallion to stud. And over the next eleven years, the Byerley Turk, a horse of decidedly Arabian appearance but otherwise unknown pedigree, stood in northern England to head the bloodstock revolution.

But for all the importance of the Byerley Turk, who was followed to English studs by the Darley Arabian in 1704 and the Godolphin Arabian in 1729, there was no great plan as such. It just so happens that a few of the great and the good of English society took it into their heads that by mixing the Middle Eastern bloodline with the native stock, they would produce a better racehorse. There was no overarching genetic science to suggest it would work – that explanation was some centuries away. It was simply a notion of an idea. But it was an idea of astonishing perceptiveness, for within the space of a few decades they had bred what was termed the ‘enhanced English racehorse’; and with a further nod to Middle Eastern heritage, the Middle Eastern word Thoroughbred was adopted to define this new breed of equine that was by the 1750s being exported to North America, Europe and around the globe. The international bloodstock business is older than you might suppose.

So, if you took the trouble to trace back Frankel’s family tree for the thirty or forty generations to those pioneering days of the early eighteenth century, you would find in his pedigree at least one of those three Arabian stallions. And Frankel is not alone. For it is a remarkable fact that every single Thoroughbred racehorse you see alive today is a blood relative of at least one of those three foundation sires. It is odd to think had a stray bullet hit the Turk on a distant battlefield, in a time far removed from ours today, all this might never have come to be.

The Port of Holyhead does not look much like a hub of the international bloodstock trade. Arrivals from across the Irish Sea are greeted by a sign that welcomes them to the Isle of Anglesey, with the next prominent landmark the Lidl supermarket. Those departing from this northwest outpost of Wales probably don’t feel inclined to shed a tear. It is not a place to linger. Swathes of tarmac. Chain link fencing. Custom sheds. Signs pointing you in every direction. Passport control. All bathed in the halogen orange glow from the array of tall lights that suck yet more life out of an already depressing scene. Huge juggernauts wait in line, their engines humming away as their drivers, experts in long waits, fiddle with their phones or doze. And among the lines of freight are horses. Lots of horses. For this is the primary (and shortest) route along which thousands of racehorses, from valuable stallions in their prime to newly born foals just a few days old, will pass each year between the UK and Ireland.

Sometimes they are easy to spot; the Coolmore transporters are giant billboards. The commercial horse movers have sleek wagons and the livery to announce their trade. There are maybe a dozen or more horses on board each lorry, plus accompanying grooms. But oftentimes the horse boxes are so discreet that you would barely recognise them as such. White lorries, not much bigger than a box van, with little to identify the cargo of two inside. And a Juddmonte lorry, on a bleak February evening awaiting the night ferry, was a six-year-old mare called Kind with her first foal, a bay colt who had been born at Banstead Stud just nineteen days earlier. As the lorry mounted the ramp into the oily aura of the cargo deck, the foal might have felt some trepidation. The swaying of the boat. The shouted instructions. The echoing roar of diesel engines that reverberate in the hugeness of the hold, booming for one last time before falling silent. The banging and clanking is alarming even to those who understand such things, as the stevedores haul chains to lock down the chassis to the steel floor. A winter Irish Sea is rarely calm.

I’d like to think Kind was a good mother to her young foal on that journey, reassuring him as each new day brought new things to learn and experience. Though I can’t be sure, I’m fairly confident I’m right.

I’ve met Kind, who is sweet and kind. The last time I saw her, she was with her newly arrived filly. The pair were in one of the stalls in the American-style barn at Coolmore while Kind underwent acupuncture. The past years have not always been easy for Kind. After five consecutive foals, she had a barren year when she did not conceive, then had another live foal who raced as Proconsul, then slipped (that is to say, aborted), then was barren again, then slipped the next two seasons to finally produce in her seventeenth year the filly foal that I met.

As the stable hand held her head and the acupuncturist did her work, the leggy foal wandered out of the gaze of her mother to join me at the half-opened door, curious at the new arrival. As she nuzzled her head into my chest, I stroked her young hair, which was clumpy rather than smooth, more like soft wool to the touch. Looking over, I saw mother turn her head away from watching the pin woman to check on her foal and check me out. It was kindness exemplified. For in that nanosecond, you could see in those brown eyes concern, care and then contentment all in a flash of maternal assessment. She’s definitely a good mother.

You probably know, or at least have gathered, that Kind is Frankel’s mother. In many ways, I feel a bit mean not starting out by telling you about Kind first but it seems that, at least in terms of headline grabs and eye-watering valuations, it is the sires that win out. But not everyone feels that way. There are plenty in the bloodstock world who value the female line above the male. In fact, it is no accident that the Arabs sold stallions to the avaricious English. They did then, and do now, hold on to their fillies. The truth is that sires get star billing through sheer weight of numbers. Even the most fecund mare will likely not produce more than a dozen or fourteen foals in her lifetime; as we have seen, for a leading sire the number can run into thousands. Whichever way you cut it, for good or ill, the odds are weighted in favour of the guys, and the sheer familiarity of their names, so frequently repeated in race cards and race reports, reinforces any stallion brand. So, let me tell you about Kind.

She was born in Ireland, bred by Frankel’s owner Prince Khalid who still owns her today. Her father was a great stallion called Danehill, also bred by Prince Khalid. Her mother was the daughter of a Derby winner and her great-grandfather was Northern Dancer, that bloodline so coveted by Coolmore. If all these various names become something of a blur, I understand; it is maybe enough to know that Kind, and so in turn Frankel, had great parentage. Her racing career, it is probably fair to say, was successful without being stellar. Like her famous son she raced at two, three and four, notching up a run of five consecutive wins in her middle year and with one further win in her last. She was retired to Banstead Manor that summer to become a broodmare, and it was to be there rather than on the racecourse that her destiny truly lay.

She arrived at her new home at what was to be the perfect time in her life for her new calling. Though as a filly she would have been sexually mature at two, ready to breed in a wild herd, at four coming up to five she was now fully developed. And that is important for there is little point rushing these things – a healthy, well-looked-after mare will be able, accidents and difficulties aside, to produce a foal every year into her early twenties.

Her new life would have been both similar and different to that of being in training. The stables are not so different, laid out in rectangular blocks amid which the daily routine of a horse yard – feeding, grooming and light exercise – ticks on by. But the testosterone-charged young colts are absent. The highs and lows of racing success that inevitably both fire up and disappoint the stable staff are no longer present. In fact, it is noticeable that everyone is generally a generation older. They’ve done their time in the cauldron of a racing yard or come straight into the stud industry, opting for a life where the results of what you do today will be measured in the years to come rather than in the months or weeks. You sense they know they are the guardians of the future. Doing something that takes a certain care and patience.

For Kind, she has been ridden for the last time; nobody will ever sit on her back again. Nor will a bit part her mouth or a bridle be placed on her head. No saddle girths tightened around her middle. The farrier will remove her shoes; she will remain unshod until the day she dies. Gradually, she will lose the musculature of a fit racehorse as her frame fills out a little. More rounded. More feminine. Gallops are replaced with paddock life. It is, in a beautiful place, with people who care for your every need, about as perfect a life as you might imagine.

Arriving from the racecourse, Ed Murrell, then the Banstead Manor stud groom (now assistant stud manager), describes her as a ‘slab of a horse’, weighing in at a racing-fit 550 kg. Out of context that figure doesn’t mean much, but if you consider that Frankel was not much heavier, you’ll understand what a tremendously strong filly she is. It sounds a little unkind when Ed adds that she has a ‘massive behind’, but it is a statement of what Kind was: a sprinter. A mare endowed with exceptional acceleration and speed, powered by those ‘massive’ rear quarters that made her such a potent force in races of under a mile. There is not much subtlety about sprinting. Tactics are not the thing. Break fast from the stalls. Keep out of trouble. Cruise at speed in the middle section and then fire up that equine body for all it is worth once the winning post looms. In the shortest of the sprint races held in the UK and Ireland of five furlongs (five-eighths of a mile), it will all be over in sixty seconds. In understanding Frankel, you need to know how important the speed genes of Kind were. It is vital to the tale.

But all this was a little way off as Kind was let slip to run free in an empty field. For close on four years she had led the life of a prime athlete with training, conditioning and diet all focused on the single aim of making her fast. But now with Quiff, her turn-out companion, also on the way to becoming a broodmare, they explore the tiny paddock, no more than a quarter of an acre, in a remote corner of Banstead’s 379 acres. Day and night they have nothing but the skies above. Gone is the life in a stable. The daily gallops. The wind up, or the wind down, from competitive racing.

Free of all the paraphernalia of being a racehorse, bar a single head collar, they roll in the dusty turf of summer. Standing head to tail in the heat of the day, gently flicking flies from around their respective heads. At night they stare at the stars. At dawn they lick the fresh dew from the grass. Sometimes, with a sudden burst of energy, one of them will kick up heels and do a rapid circuit of the field, but for the most part little moves, fast or slow. A few times a day, one of the stud hands comes by to check all is well. They soon understand the rhythm of these visits, anticipating with remarkable precision the ones that include a bucket of feed. Sometimes, the farrier drops by to inspect their feet but it is routine; no more complicated than a pedicure.

Quiff and Kind become inseparable, even as they move to ever-larger paddocks; trusted to cope with ever-widening freedom, they stay by each other’s side day and night. If one is led away for any reason, the other stands by the gate until her partner returns. It is, in truth, a relationship deliberately nurtured by the stud as two mares of similar ages, background and breeding evolve from competition to the brink of motherhood. For we sometimes assume that animals know it all. All habits and instinct passed down through the generations by some invisible hand. But that really isn’t so. Horses, like people, learn from each other. They observe. They replicate. They take comfort from each other. As herd animals, they need each other.

But it cannot forever be summer, even in the idyll of Banstead Manor. Gradually, the chill of the late September mornings are upon us. As people don their coats for the morning commute so do Quiff and Kind of the horse kind, with light blankets that cover their backs and sides. As autumn morphs into winter, the pair are brought in at night, housed in adjacent stables still connected by way of a grilled partition between the two stalls.

But the changes to Quiff and Kind are not just confined to the daily routine. They are reverting to their natural state. The shorter days and longer nights trigger a change in their reproductive cycle which goes into abeyance. This time, the anoestrus, is a period of sexual inactivity when, in a throwback to their time in the wild, mares are not receptive to mating. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The gestation period for a horse is roughly eleven months, so conceiving in winter would result in a winter birth, greatly reducing the likely survival of both foal and mare. Evolution is nothing if not ingenious.

But for Ed, Mother Nature is sometimes something of an impediment to a smooth breeding programme. The difficulty is that the days of February, when the covering season starts, are just as short as November and horses are, in the jargon, long-day breeders, the ovulation cycle triggered by that and the availability of food. Strangely, temperature doesn’t have much impact which, as it turns out, is fortunate since in deepest Suffolk, though you can’t do much about the weather, you can do something about day length and food. So, without them probably even noticing, the daily routine of Quiff and Kind is subtly altered in January. Gradually, the nutrition of their feed is increased while at the same time the lights in the stable are kept on until 10 pm. Without the use of drugs or any other intervention, January is all of a sudden May.

And so it was that both Quiff and Kind were readied to lose their maidenhood. For Kind it came quickly, one of the early-season breeders, visiting Sadler’s Wells at Coolmore Stud in Ireland on 27 February. With almost impeccable promptness, she gave birth eleven months and a day later to that young foal we met on the ferry when he was just shy of three weeks old. It would be reasonable to assume that his part in the story, as simply Kind’s first foal, ends here. But racing has all sorts of interconnections and we will see, and hear, a great deal more about this horse who was to be named Bullet Train. Not only is he Frankel’s half-brother,* but he was to be involved in six races against his part sibling, including one that had an almost calamitous ending.

Back to that Irish Sea crossing, as the ferry docks in Dublin, the humans rejoin the horses. The horses, who are left alone for all the journey bar the occasional inspection, look more alert than the bleary-eyed driver and travelling groom. However often you travel the night ferry, it still manages to sap the soul. The constant dull thud of the diesel engines. The sometimes alarming hollow bang as a big wave hits the side. Travellers in uncomfortable poses stretched out on plastic bench seats. Staff in cheap white shirts and inappropriate black bow ties pushing a cloth across the counter top, trying not to think that the return trip starts again in under an hour. Through the scratched Perspex of the rain-flecked windows more orange lights illuminate a point arrival that is not much prettier than the point of departure. None of this is helped by the fact that we are still two hours ahead of an Irish February dawn. In fact, Kind and Bullet Train are probably the chirpiest on board. Life in the stall of a horse box is not so different to that in the stall of a horse barn. Admittedly it is smaller, but all the comforts of home – hay, water and warmth – are there, with the little foal suckling on his mother’s milk.

Ahead of the Dublin rush-hour traffic the run to Coolmore, 115 miles to the southwest, is quick. The high windows of the horse box wouldn’t have afforded our pair the view that intrigued me so much as they drew close to their destination. In fact, they would have seen nothing until the side ramp was lowered, the internal panels swung back and they were led to their new, albeit temporary, home. Kind was back on Irish soil for the second time in a year.

Even though Lakeview Yard is reserved for the best broodmares visiting the best of the Coolmore stallions, it lacks the grandiosity of Kind’s regular home. It is functional rather than fancy. On three sides of a square are ranged twenty-five stables built of breeze blocks painted white with a low-pitched slate roof that surround a plain courtyard with a square of grass and a tree at the centre. The fourth side is half filled by a squat bungalow of similar construction in which the Lakeview Yard manager lives.

But nobody is here for the architecture. The beauty lies in the location. It is a quiet corner away from the hustle and bustle of stud life. All around are horse paddocks that run down to the lake, interspersed with clumps of woodland. There is not a public road in sight. The only people you’ll ever see are working or visiting the stud. You are largely sealed away from life as most people know it. Here, mothers fresh from giving birth have time and space to recuperate. Newly born foals are introduced to the world ever so gradually. It is all about calm. Routine. And care.

However, for all the wondrousness of this lifestyle, Kind is not here to raise her foal. She is here to create her next. Who will be the greatest of all time.

* In bloodstock terms the two horses are actually three-part brothers: in addition to sharing their mother, Kind, Frankel’s grandfather, Sadler’s Wells, was Bullet Train’s father.

3

Creation day

I am no bioethicist. I can’t cogently argue when life – human, equine or any other for that matter – truly begins. The last time I visited Tipperary, it was a question exercising and dividing a nation. The lampposts of Fethard were the placard poles for the abortion referendum posters. The images were not always good to look at, the words designed to compel an opinion. But there did seem to be a certain democracy about the debate, alternate lampposts pro and anti, while the conversation, apparently more heated elsewhere, seemed to have largely passed by the regulars of McCarthy’s bar.

I think we’ll take our lead from them and not worry too much about a higher debate. Let’s simply assume that the Frankel story truly begins in a covering barn, somewhere in rural Ireland, with the union of Kind and Galileo on a first Saturday in March. Reproduction doesn’t take the weekend off.

There is nothing very romantic about the covering barn at Coolmore or any that I have seen for that matter. If I called it what it is without euphemism – the mating complex – you can draw a better picture in your mind. None of it would win architectural prizes; this is essentially a series of agricultural steel outbuildings. At the unloading bay, Kind and Bullet Train are led from the horse box into the pre-covering shed, their arrival eye-balled every step of the way by the teasers who occupy three stalls along one wall.

One will be brought out for the final affirmation that all is well. It will be. Away in the corner is the veterinary bay where Kind is washed, prepared and most importantly checked to prove she is who she’s supposed to be. Horses, like people, have passports. Satisfied, a handler clips a leather fob, with a brass tab engraved with the name GALILEO, to Kind’s head collar. All that remains now is for her to await her suitor, which she does with Bullet Train, under the only concession to prettiness, a rose-covered arbour.

Coolmore is a busy place at the height of the breeding season; there is not just one covering shed, but two, one to the left and one to the right of the atrium into which Kind and her foal are led. Each shed is pretty big. I guess you’d easily fit two tennis courts inside. It is hexadecagonal, with a skylight set in each of the sixteen sections of the domed roof that give the place a light and airy feel. Each wall section is padded, as are the doors. The floor is fibresand mixed rubber chippings, raked flat with the exception of a small coconut matting dais at the centre which is about the size and elevation of a flat-topped road hump, a step up when the respective heights of mare and stallion are out of kilter. Like everything else, it is calm and ordered and, at this precise moment, empty of horse and human.

Kind’s day had started much like all the others since she and Bullet Train had arrived two weeks earlier, brought in from the paddock just before sunrise to their stall in the Lakeview Yard after the night outside. On a typical day, the foal will snuggle down into the deep straw to sleep, while Kind, relieved of the duties of motherhood for a few hours, eats her feed and relaxes. But this early dawn morning will not be typical. For Kind this will be the day: pronounced ready for the stallion by the vet who has been checking her ovaries daily since she came into season. Mares have an oestrous cycle of fifteen to twenty-one days which divides into two parts: the bulk of it, roughly fourteen days, will be the dioestrus, the period of sexual inactivity. That for the stud manager is relatively easy to pick. However, knowing when not to mate your mare is of limited use. What you really need to know is on which of those remaining five or so days she will be on heat and ready to mate. At this point, human knowledge and science is only of so much use. Enter the teaser.

If you had to conjure in your mind an image of the teaser, forget all ideas of some equine lothario, with chiselled looks and a demeanour honed on the memory of a thousand conquests. Rather cast your mind back to those Norman Thelwell cartoons and the recalcitrant, world weary and forever scruffy pony, where life would be easy but for the daily demands of others. That is the teaser, the pony stallion, whose job around the stud is to detect when the mare is in ‘heat’, ready for a stallion a good deal further up the pecking order than him. It takes the old expression ‘forever the bridesmaid but never the bride’ to a whole new plane.

It would be easy to stereotype Padraig, Kind’s teaser (I’ve made up his name as the otherwise impeccable Coolmore records don’t record which teaser was in what barn in what year), as a randy old so-and-so, frustrated in every aspect of his life, mooching from one ultimately unavailable female to the next. But under that cascading fringe hides a more sophisticated animal than you might imagine. To start with, it is not always about detecting heat. In the wild, in running with the herd a maiden mare, one still to be covered, would have witnessed the act of mating many times. By the time her turn comes, she would at least have some idea of what was about to happen. But a newly retired racing mare? Probably not. So the teaser takes to ‘bouncing’, mounting (without penetrating) the maiden mare until she accepts, or at least understands, what is going on and has confidence in the presence of a stallion. A patient teaser is important, because this is meant to be a gradual learning process rather than some kind of sexual shock and awe.

Of course, for Kind, she is no longer a maiden – this is second time around. Padraig’s job is to detect that change in her cycle that is beyond any human. So, as the calendar ticks around to that moment, Kind and Padraig are brought together each day soon after breakfast in the Lakeview Yard. It is tempting to see Padraig as a catalyst in the process, but he is not that at all. His job is rather, just by his very presence, to elicit a reaction from Kind for others to gauge. And that I suspect would have been pretty definitive. For Ed Murrell says she quite gets her blood up when something upsets her. An unwanted stallion at the wrong time would certainly fall into that category as she’d clamp down her tail, put back her ears and attempt to bite or kick an unwelcome Padraig, who would be swiftly led away for another try a day or two later. That’s even assuming she’d even let him near her, which is by no means a given. Sometimes, he never even gets close.

But the change from no to yes is swift. One day, snarling dismissal. The next, acceptance. Instead of moving away from Padraig, Kind lets him nip and lick along her body starting at her neck, down her shoulders along her side and to her tail, his head constantly moving. Probing. His whole body aquiver at the sign of a receptive mare. She relaxes, leans towards him, straddling her legs, lifting her tail to allow him to sniff, and again lick and nip, at her genitals. For a mare that so often knows her own mind, Kind becomes placid. That is the final tell that her time has arrived.

However, before we follow the short journey Kind and Bullet Train took early on that Saturday morning to meet with Galileo in the covering barn, it is worth asking how exactly we have arrived at this point. In hindsight, the pairing looks both brilliant and obvious, but the who and the why deserve both credit and explanation. For the Frankel story started longer ago than you might imagine.

Prince Khalid bin Abdullah, a member of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family, first visited a racecourse just shy of his twentieth birthday in 1956. Though Longchamp in France was to become the scene of some of his greatest racing triumphs including the consecutive victories of the filly Enable in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe of 2017 and 2018, the day obviously didn’t spark any immediate passion, for it was not until the late 1970s that he began to buy racehorses. He was one of that group of Arabs who at that time, took the international racing scene across the UK, France and the United States by storm, upending the old order. Success came quickly. The Prince had his first winner of any kind in 1979 (at Windsor), and when Known Fact won the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket the following year, he became the first Arab owner of an English Classic. Now you might say he bought success. He, and others, did indeed pay outrageous prices. But what choice did they have? They didn’t have the studs. They didn’t have the bloodlines. Prince Khalid set out to change that.

I could try to paraphrase the Prince’s thinking, but his words taken from an interview for the Racing Post in 2010 pretty well tell it all: ‘When I was at the [bloodstock] sales I realised that it would be easier to buy horses and race them, but I got the feeling that this was not enough, that it would be more fun to do what people like the Aga Khan and Lord Howard de Walden did and build up your own families.’

He chose the breeding above buying route early on, with his first home-bred winner coming in 1982. The properties soon followed, with horse farms in England, Ireland and the United States, all of which come under the Juddmonte Farms banner. He calls Juddmonte his ‘only hobby’, run for the pleasure of breeding and racing the thoroughbred horse rather than a business. I had no special access to the financial side of the operation during the writing of this book, but in my gut that chimes true. All the places of his that I visited that touched the life of Frankel – Banstead Manor Stud in Suffolk, New Abbey Stud and Ferrans in Ireland – felt like homes, a fact not just reflected in the places but in the people as well.

Henry Ford once said, ‘The harder I work the luckier I get.’ I think we can reasonably apply that epithet to the Juddmonte racing empire. They don’t shout their extraordinary success from the rooftops, so perhaps we don’t entirely realise their achievements. When the Prince mentioned the Aga Khan and Howard de Walden, he was referencing families who have been breeding racehorses for generations. He has achieved the same in three decades. And how? Well, it is very much by the Arab way of building up what has been described on occasion as, ‘one of the greatest broodmare bands in the history of breeding’. The results are amazing. By 1997, all the five English Classics had been won by home-bred horses. Prince Khalid has in numerous years before and since been the leading owner, mostly with horses he bred himself, in Britain and the United States. I won’t rattle off all the statistics, but you’d be right to assume it is impressive. So, this is the heritage of Kind, a second-generation Juddmonte mare. That is to say, Prince Khalid bought her grandfather Rainbow Quest and bred her mother Rainbow Lake.

The decision to mate Kind with Galileo was made by Prince Khalid the previous November prior to plotting out the covering programme. It is a big task, the aim being to plan on somewhere over 200 foals to be born in eighteen months’ time that will race in the Prince’s green, pink and white colours three years after that. You are truly planning for the future. Inevitably, with that number of mares to place, some decisions are more debated over than others. Kind, even though she was just a one-foal mare, was particularly well thought of, so merited extra consideration not least because she had what they call the nick.

Thoroughbred racehorse breeding is high-octane stuff. Not much is left to chance and such is the huge volume of statistical data from both breeding records and racecourse performances that every Juddmonte decision, certainly at this level, is based on quantifiable facts. Naturally, today the amount of information is huge, but that is not a strictly modern phenomenon: Kind’s family tree, and that of every thoroughbred, can be traced back with certainty to the seventeenth century thanks to the publication of the General Stud Book by James Weatherby in 1791 who set to record ‘the pedigree of every horse, mare etc. of any note, that has appeared on the turf for the last fifty years, and many of an earlier date …’ He was well placed to do this, as the Weatherby family were publishers of the Racing Calendar that had been recording all horse races and matches since 1727, something they continue to do today with the annual publication of both books.

It all looks so easy now, but when Prince Khalid, assisted by Juddmonte’s general manager, Philip Mitchell, sat down at Banstead Manor Stud, with background analysis done by pedigree experts Andrew Caulfield and Claire Curry, as the beech tree leaves started to curl brown with the first frost of autumn, Galileo was not the potent force we know him to be today. He was still up and coming. Likewise, Kind was unproven. Even little Bullet Train was still two years away from his racecourse debut. But the reasoning was not overcomplicated: Galileo was a proven middle-distance performer. That is to say, he was at his most effective between a mile and a quarter and a mile and a half. Kind, as a sprinter, could provide speed.

Prince Khalid and Philip had some other salient facts to draw on: Although Kind’s dam Rainbow Lake had plenty of stamina, Kind herself had sprinting speed through her father Danehill, whereas her half-brother Powerscourt demonstrated the middle distance class of the pedigree, having recently retired with a gilded reputation after winning his final race, the Arlington Million. (This was one of the leading turf contests in the US, so called as the first ever TB race to offer a purse of $1,000,000 when inaugurated in 1981.) And finally there was that nick.

I have to confess I had never come across the term the ‘nick’ until I began to research this book. If you do some googling, you will discover that vast amounts of cloud space are given over to this concept, as algorithms are deployed to drill down into every breeding permutation there has ever been to discover those that work best. It is a sort of genetic prospecting, trying to discover a new vein of equine gold. Summarised in a few words the nick is when the offspring of a particular stallion and the daughters of an unrelated stallion produce a higher than expected proportion of good performers. In our particular case, the two in question are Sadler’s Wells, Galileo’s father and Danehill, Kind’s father, with one such ‘nick’ being Powerscourt. Now not everyone is entirely signed up to the nick theory. Horse-breeding writers Matthew Binns and Tony Morris, who provided the summary you just read, are less convinced. They contend, without absolutely coming down on one side of the fence or another, that if you mate superior individuals the probability over time is that you will produce a higher than average number of superior offspring. But that is enough of the theory; what Kind and Galileo were about to do was put it into practice.

It is still dark as the horse box rattles down the estate road to the Lakeview Yard. Kind had been allocated the first slot of the day, 7 am. Her reaction to Padraig had pronounced her ready the previous day. The vet was satisfied. That combination of old-fashioned breeding lore and modern science told the Coolmore team that her time was upon them.

Kind and her foal are loaded together into the box. There is no question of them being separated even though this will take under an hour. Separation would cause too much distress for both; after all, in the wild, in a herd, the foal would be at his or her mother’s side during mating. Why should this be any different?

The journey is not long. Ten minutes at most. Back up the estate road, across the public road and into the home grounds of the Coolmore stallions, which is altogether more grandiose than that of the mares. The gate man, from inside his temple-style, Portland stone gate house pushes a button to allow the huge, black wrought-iron gates to swing open. Along the drive of mature trees and manicured grass, the statues of the Coolmore greats pay silent heed to our early-morning arrivals. Ahead is the Magnier home, largely obscured by a high hedge above which peeks a fancy Swiss Family Robinson-style treehouse that reminds us that this is still, for all the bloodstock high finance, a family business.

Around the back, among the complex of stables, barns and offices it is altogether more workmanlike. Kind and her foal are unloaded and led into the pre-covering shed. The horse box remains, ramp down. This should not take long. The shed is cream-walled with a corrugated-iron roof and a large, blue-black sliding door that opens into a double-height shed lit by halogen lights high up in the rafters that counter the morning gloom. The floor has a deep covering of fine shredded rubber that muffles all sound. To the side are the three teaser stalls; behind the mesh door of one, the nose of a shaggy head moves from side to side, tracking every movement of the incoming occupants. At the opposite end is a rubber-floored, brightly lit veterinary bay that has the air of a surgery. Into here is led Kind; her foal, still in sight of mother, is gently held outside by two stable hands.

None of this would be unusual or unsettling to our pair; being handled, put in and out of horse boxes, moved to unfamiliar places and meeting unfamiliar people is part of the daily fabric of their lives. As the team wash her vulval area and bandage her tail to avoid any stray hairs interfering at the moment of covering, Kind thinks little of it. If nothing else, she has gone through precisely all this a year before. The hand-held scanner is passed over her neck, bringing up her ID number on the display from the microchip that was inserted soon after birth. A check against her passport confirms she is indeed who she is purported to be. It is not always that easy: American horses are identified by a tattoo on the inside of the lip which is notoriously hard to read, and Australian horses are branded. Again, not always easy to read. That is not to say high-end technology has all the answers. The Coolmore way of reminding everyone which mare is destined for which stallion is the leather fob bearing the stallion’s name, which is attached to the mare’s head collar. Simple. Effective.

Back out among the fine shredded floor covering of the shed, there is one last test. A stall door swings open to reveal our moving nose which is attached to a Padraig lookalike. Different barns, different teasers, but let’s call him Nosey. In half a dozen of his very short strides he is upsides Kind who doesn’t move at his approach, and almost without breaking stride he rears up to mount her, not from the rear as you might suppose but from the side, draping his front legs across her back where a saddle might be. It is practised and smooth. Almost balletic. Kind’s compliant acceptance of this act is the final confirmation she is ready. From the moment the door opens to Kind shrugging him off and Nosey on his way back to his stall – both seem to accept this for what it is, a final unrequited affirmation – takes no more than twenty seconds. As the stall door closes shut and Nosey is shrouded from view, Kind and Bullet Train leave the barn. Outside, in the pretty arbour, they await the call to attend Galileo like brides before the door of the church.

Galileo doesn’t need a horse box for his thrice daily journey to the covering shed; there is a private back route that takes him from stable to shed in a minute or two. No distractions. Nothing left to chance. This is a stallion prepped and ready to go. He knows the walk. He knows the routine. He knows what lies at the end of this particular yellow brick road. This is, after all, his job.

It is hard to overstate how very simple Galileo’s life is. Wake up. Have some food. Take a bit of exercise. Relax between two or three bouts of servicing your ever-changing harem. Retire for the night. That has pretty well been the sum of it for fifteen years; yesterday the template for today and today the template for tomorrow. For the highest paid athlete on the planet it is all remarkably, well I want to say boring, but that is not the correct word. People sometimes worry that horses get bored, but that doesn’t seem the case to me. As long as you attend to their essential needs with kindness, food, warmth and care, the passing of the days seems not to matter to them. They are, in the best of ways, simple souls. Shall we agree his life, of which a human might have much to envy, is comfortingly routine?

Galileo starts his day with what all horses crave: food. He has five meals a day, plenty to look forward to though they are smaller than your average stallion portions. A few years ago, he had a colon operation so for his own well-being he has a special diet of five reduced-size meals rather that the more normal three. Horses this valuable have nutritionists too. On the stable floor are wood shavings, not the favoured bedding of Coolmore as they can be dusty which gets in the lungs. Most animals have straw but Galileo would eat it – a tender colon and roughage-rich straw has all the potential for disaster. But he won’t go hungry by choice; there is always a pile of home-grown hay in the corner to pick at.

Like any horse he gets his exercise. Noel, his groom, lunges him each day in his paddock, trotting him in a circle controlled by a lunging line that is about 10 yards in length. Round and round they go for twenty or thirty minutes like some kind of human/equine whirligig, burning off energy until the pair have had enough. A bit later on, weather permitting, there will be a two-mile power walk. In the end, it is a toss-up who is the fitter – Noel or Galileo.

Galileo, along with the other five leading Coolmore stallions, live apart from everyone else. Their stables, two blocks of triple stalls, stand at right angles to each other overlooking a courtyard with a little park beyond. Each individual stable is big; if you are familiar with horse stables think at least twice the usual size. If not, think one half of a tennis court. The walls are whitewashed, the barrel-shaped double-height roof lined with cedar wood, with a large, half-moon-shaped window in the end wall with about a quarter of the roof given over to two enormous skylights. In the ceiling are water sprinklers and smoke detectors, no doubt the requirement of some ultra-cautious insurance company who carries the risk of these super-valuable residents. An infrared heating lamp hangs down ready to take the chill off a cold night.

For the top half of the stable door is never closed. Horses like the comings and goings of stable life. They must see the same things a thousand times or more. Still they stand and watch, those brown eyes tracking every small movement. Familiar figures confirming all is well. Strangers the subject of particular interest. At night, they are mostly awake; horses only need about three hours’ sleep in every twenty-four and largely do it while standing up. But at night there is still plenty going on. Mice scurry about gathering stray corn seeds, often shadowed by the stable cats never shy of spotting an opportunity. Occasionally, a fox pads on through, sliding through the shadows, curious but furtive. Bats flit. Owls hoot. The darkness provides a soothing blanket. Every hour a human figure appears, the shielded beam of a torch checking the occupants of each stall. And they’ll tell you that on a clear night, Galileo stands for hours staring up, his skylights a window to the stars. Maybe like his namesake, the father of astronomy, he sees things in the galaxy that are beyond our knowing?

The clatter of food bins brings all six residents to their doors. Night is over. It is day again. About the time when Nosey was slipping off Kind, Galileo was chasing the last few oats around his feed bin. The bolts of the door clank. He turns to Noel, slightly inclining his head, allowing the head collar, with brass chain and leading rein attached, to be slipped on. The pair head for the door, across the yard, down the hedge-lined path between the stallion paddocks before turning left up the short incline to the covering barn. With well-timed precision, as the doors of the barn slide open for Galileo, Kind and the foal enter from the opposite doors. The foal is peeled away, stiff limbed in the restraint of two stable hands who gently hold him up close to the wall, far enough away but still in sight of the soon to be coupling pair.

Jutting out from the wall, in direct line between the two entrance doors, is the teasing rail. It is here, for the first time, that Kind and Galileo come together. The rail isn’t a rail at all. It is a barrier. A reinforced, padded board that is 5 feet high and 12 feet long. In other words, about the height (to the neck) and length of a horse. Just enough to allow division with the opportunity for union.

At first, the pair start head to head. There’s a brief shaking of heads, a meeting of eyes, but like the teaser Padraig, Galileo’s interest lies elsewhere. As Kind is held parallel to the rail he turns towards her tail end. His head slides down her mane, his nose then rubbing against her spine, sliding up, then down her rib cage, inexorably moving rearwards, nipping at her flesh. Snorting in appreciation of what is to come. Kind stands rigid, all four legs slightly splayed. As Galileo reaches her rump she lifts her tail to expose herself. He lets off a deafening retort as he sniffs and licks and nips her vulva. Kind’s tail rises further, fully posed. Galileo kicks and thumps at the teasing rail. It is not natural and it should not be there. He lets his displeasure be known. Kind quivers as a stream of hot, odourful urine waterfalls out of her. She is staling, proof that she is ready.

As the two are backed to the centre of the barn the pheromones from her steaming urine reach Galileo, triggering the Flehmen response. This is really quite frightening to behold; the German origin of the word flemmen that means to look spiteful is not far from the truth. Here’s the side of Galileo rarely seen. A horse defined by what he now is. A stallion ready for his mare. His otherwise placid face contorts as he stretches his head high in the air, curls back his upper lip, exposes his front teeth and white gums, narrowing his nostrils to suck in the smell of Kind. When the scents hit his nasal organs in the roof of his mouth he holds the pose for a few seconds, as if he was a sommelier savouring the bouquet of a rare vintage. As he lowers his head the handler leads him, erect and ready, towards Kind.

She sees nothing of this; Galileo is away and behind her. Her movements are restricted by not only two handlers at her head but giant soft felt boots that engulf her rear hooves. Her hobbling gait looks uncomfortable but it’s necessary; a single kick can inflict great damage on both horse and human, so the boots are put on soon after she arrives in the barn. Like at the teasing rail Kind stands legs splayed. Braced. At her head one handler takes the reins, while the other stands by with the twitch in hand, which is nothing more than a stout broom handle with a loop of rope at the end. A few yards away the foal looks on, eyes fixed on his mother in a scene that must be totally incomprehensible, leaning hard against the handlers as if to take comfort from their grip.

Kind is allowed to look around to see Galileo is approaching; it is important she is not caught unawares. The twitch is applied to her upper lip, the rope loop twisted around to cause a certain amount of pain. At first, this is both a distraction and a restraint. Then a rush of endorphins kicks in, dulling the pain before creating a feeling of calm. The moment has nearly arrived. Galileo is ready. Anyone can see that. But Kind’s signals are more subtle. She lowers her rear in a very slight squat before raising her tail and winking to her stallion, the vulva turning outwards to expose her clitoris.

Galileo raises himself up on his hind legs, pausing for a moment in mid-air before, with remarkable poise, he lowers himself slowly down, his front legs sliding either side of Kind’s back before gripping at her belly. He doesn’t slump over. He uses his colossal strength, aided no doubt by pumping adrenalin, to hold himself above her. Beneath, his rigid penis sways from side to side. The stallion manager steps forward, guiding Galileo into Kind. At the moment of penetration Galileo arches his back, leans forward to bite her on the neck, gripping her mane and a roll of flesh in his mouth, the combination of legs and teeth giving him enough purchase to start thrusting into Kind.

The mating is not as violent or as animalistic as you might imagine. Kind is ready. Compliant. Relaxed, even. Galileo by contrast is the picture of concentration, his tail stretched downwards to the ground in perfect alignment with his back, his neck and head curved, his eyes gone to another place. While he thrusts and thrusts and thrusts. There is very little noise. Some deep sucks of air. Hooves readjusting on the floor. The smack of flesh on flesh. Spittle trails appear down Kind’s neck. A patch of her mane becomes matted wet. Nobody talks.

It doesn’t last for long. I didn’t time it, but I counted the seconds in my head. Maybe twenty-five or thirty from penetration to ejaculation. Everyone turns to the stud manager who nods. It is over. He has felt the sperm pulsing through the urethra at the base of the penis. It is important to know that it has truly happened. Galileo pauses for a few seconds further over Kind to allow his engorgement to subside before he slides back, off and away.

Relieved of the pressure, Kind straightens her legs and stands upright again. She pricks her ears at the sight of the foal, the two led on converging paths meeting just before they go out of the door. Bullet Train skips with joy at their reunion, giving his mother a gentle nudge to the belly. Kind turns her head to him ever so slightly, as if by way of grateful maternal acknowledgement, before they disappear from view. Across the other side, Galileo is leaving. There are no backward or lingering glances. It is most definitely over. Within a minute or two the barn is empty of both people and horses. All that is left is a few damp patches on the floor from the wash down water and, lying at crazy angles and in random spots, a pair of discarded felt boots.

Creation day has lasted less than an hour.

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.

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