Frankel
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In horse racing greatness is defined by speed. Being the second fastest counts for little. You have to win. And win. And keep winning until every challenger of your generation is put to the sword. Of the twelve horses lined up on Newmarket Heath that 2011 day, one would do just that. And more. To become the greatest racehorse that has ever lived.Frankel was born on 11 February 2008, with four white socks and a blaze, from impressive equine lines on both his parents’ sides. Simon Cooper revisits the whole of the horse’s life, giving readers an inside tour of the calm oasis that is life a stud farm, where a foal will live with his mother for the first year of his life. Next, the atmosphere of heady possibility that marks the early days of training. Roadwork. Gallops. Trials. Turning raw potential into something more. Frankel begins to set himself apart.A detailed and fast-paced narrative breathlessly recounts the racing career of the horse who, by his retirement to stud at the age of 4, would be rated the greatest of all time. Cooper weaves the horse’s tale with those of his trainer, battling cancer, the stablehands who coped with his explosive nature, the work rider who tamed him, the the jockey who rode in all fourteen of his races, and the owner who saw his potential from the very beginning. The result is a rich and multifaceted tale of modern horse racing, the lives of everyone involved, human and equine, and the unadulterated glory of winning. And winning everything.
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blew His breath over it, and created the horse.’
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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.
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