RACING: "IF I were to run that race again in another half an hour, it would be very different. Right? End of story. Can I go and have some tea?" So said Henry Cecil after Frankel became his 73rd Royal Ascot winner under a jockey who showed less than regal composure on potentially the best horse in Europe.
Tom Queally, the rider, looked grave. Cecil himself appeared shattered. Seldom has a big-race triumph imposed such strain on the victors. Frankel, the brilliant 2,000 Guineas winner, maintained his unbeaten record by taking the St James’s Palace Stakes, but only by a diminishing three-quarters of a length, as Queally’s gamble of using up his mount’s formidable burst of speed as early as the home turn almost ruined the horse’s reputation.
Royal Ascot is about the thoroughbreds first and the human finery second. But like all race meetings it relies on the pilots to get the horses home in the right order. Queally’s ride was an object lesson in how pressure can scramble thought.
Frankel’s blitzing 2,000 Guineas win had been a procession. This time, the horse settled nicely in the early stages but was driven up to join his pacemaker more than three furlongs out and then ridden vigorously into the lead with two and a half furlongs still to travel: much earlier than Cecil would have liked.
“He’s a gentleman. Complicated, but a gentleman,” Cecil said of Frankel. The great trainer might have been talking about himself. He left us in no doubt Queally would be asked to explain why he panicked as Rerouted – the pacemaker who had set a lively gallop - was ignored by the rest of the field: a policy Frankel’s rider would have been wise to adopt.
Rather than riding against the horses behind, Queally took on the animal in front – the only one incapable of winning the meeting’s most hotly anticipated contest. That left him needing to hold his mount together for the entire home straight as Zoffany delivered a late charge. By the final furlong Frankel was “paddling” in front, his concentration lapsing and his stride tightening.
“He definitely wants to be ridden differently,” Cecil confirmed. The big gain was that Frankel has shown himself to be more than a scalded cat. Maturity is enabling him to settle and not pull when the gates clang open.
“You can ride him much more like a normal horse,” Cecil said, pointedly. “He does have that very long stride and he does kill horses. You can sit longer. A furlong longer, anyway. A furlong and a half. It just went a little bit wrong today.
“That was nerve-racking, wasn’t it?” he said. Cecil’s ascent from a sharp drop in stable numbers and a continuing battle against stomach cancer has been scripted around Frankel’s wonder-horse potential. This win restores him temporarily to the ranks of good rather than great Classic winners but his admirers still fancy him to achieve equine immortality.
“He’s very good, very talented. Exceptional, really. Hopefully in the future he’ll prove it again,” Cecil said. “It didn’t go quite to plan. He got very settled, which was lovely, because he was nice and relaxed, but he almost became a little bit lazy. The pacemaker went off at quite a decent gallop. He had won his race and thought - well, rather like at Newmarket, he’d done enough. He wasn’t tired. In the Royal Lodge he ran to the line. This time he was waiting for his field. I was fine a furlong and a half out. I was getting really concerned at the end, though, because he was going to sleep.”
Queally, who was also criticised for his ride on Cecil’s Midday in the Coronation Cup at Epsom, claimed vindication in the outcome: a seventh straight victory under his guidance. The decision to blaze away in the 2,000 Guineas had been Cecil’s but on Ascot’s turf the pre-emptive strike around the turn was conceived solely by the jockey.
“Whether he’d won by 10 lengths or half a length I’d be more impressed with the way he’s mentally taken to it now,” Queally said, his tight face betraying the lack of joy in the post-race celebrations. “A bit like the Guineas I was just keeping him up to his work, just keeping him about his business. He’s won, you know? Michael did a good job, he did what he had to do. I just had to ride my race around that.”
In that claim was the basis for Queally’s bad reviews. Jockeys are not meant to ride champions “around” the scurrying work of pacemakers. Patience and timing are the decisive elements. The coup de grace cannot be delivered so early that it invites calamity.
Zoffany was having his first start at a mile, leaving trainer Aidan O’Brien satisfied. He said: “He has a lot of speed and we were obviously worried because I don’t think he’s ever raced beyond seven furlongs. We’ll definitely have another go at this trip and have a look at the Sussex Stakes or something like that.”
Patience was rewarded in droves for the Richard Hannon team when Canford Cliffs lowered the colours of Goldikova in a vintage renewal of the Queen Anne Stakes. It was 12 months to the day that the champion trainer saw Paco Boy narrowly fail to beat the French wonder mare, and privately they vowed revenge a year later.
Even then the Hannon camp felt that in Canford Cliffs (11 to 8), who won the St James’s Palace on that same card in 2010, they had a horse who could nail Goldikova.
And they were proved right as the highly-talented four-year-old colt, ridden with typical coolness by Richard Hughes, swept by the 13-times Group One winner to take the eagerly-anticipated curtain-raiser to the whole five days by a length.
O’Brien and Ryan Moore combined to record their first successes of the meeting with the unbeaten Power in the Coventry Stakes. The 4 to 1 favourite was strongly challenged by Roman Soldier inside the final furlong and after a thrilling duel, Power emerged triumphant by a neck.
GuardianService
