Simon Cooper

Frankel


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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.

      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.

      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.

      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.’

      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.