Читать книгу Frankel - Simon Cooper - Страница 11

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.