Читать книгу Frankel - Simon Cooper - Страница 13

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.