Simon Cooper

Frankel


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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.

       Day 343

      You are probably asking yourself at this particular moment why the bloodstock industry goes to all this trouble of bringing horses together from all corners of the globe for a physical mating. As you will have gathered, it is a huge and expensive logistical jigsaw. Have they not heard of artificial insemination? If it is good enough for cows, pigs, polo ponies, sheep and just about any other animal or even bird you care to name, why not horses? For goodness sake, we humans have been at it since the London surgeon John Hunter carried out the first documented insemination and subsequent successful birth in the 1770s. As ever with all things horse racing, the answer is, all at once, that complex mixture of tradition, rules, money and hard science.

      If you are thinking, well, I don’t give a damn about tradition, I’m going to be progressive about all this in embracing modern science, then you will find your foal forever excluded from thoroughbred horse racing around the globe which requires all horses to be registered in the General Stud Book. The wording is definitive: ‘Any foal resulting from or produced by the processes of Artificial Insemination, Embryo Transfer or Transplant, Cloning or any other form of genetic manipulation not herein specified, shall not be eligible for registration in The General Stud Book.’ That closes the door on anything produced other than by what the rules call ‘natural service’, as we just witnessed between Galileo and Kind.

      Then, of course, there is the money thing. The most productive bulls are inseminating over fifty thousand cows a year each. It doesn’t take a Nobel prize-winning economist to work out the supply and demand implications. Not only would there be a flight to a very few top stallions (only 95,000 thoroughbreds are registered worldwide each year) but the market would entirely collapse for everyone else. It is no exaggeration in saying that thousands of stallions would cease to be. Nobody would want them in physical or test-tube form.

      But aside from the money, the flight to a very few stallions would be a slow-burning disaster for the thoroughbred breed. Interbreeding, in horses and animals or even people for that matter (think The Madness of King George), eventually causes the bad, or more correctly recessive, genes to crowd out the good. Within a matter of generations, fewer and fewer foals would reach the racecourse as birth abnormalities became more commonplace. The racehorse as we know it – lithe, fit and fast – that began with those Arabian stallions all those centuries ago, would soon cease to be.

      An in-foal Kind returned to a different Banstead Manor Stud than the one she had left. Two months on from the bleak of February, spring had come to the Suffolk countryside. The beech trees were in vivid green leaf. Birds were nesting among the hedges that separate the paddocks. The farm tractor was rolling the fields, the broad striped grass adding a certain gaiety to the morning turn out. Kind was paired with Prove in the Blackthorn paddock, a more experienced mare who had raced in France, the two mothers-in-arms with foals to care for inside and out.

      Kind had stayed at Coolmore for a while subsequent to her time with Galileo. Two weeks after her covering she was confirmed as pregnant by a scan, an ultrasound that creates that same fuzzy black-and-white photo expectant parents hang on the fridge door. The egg, a single cell about the size of a grain of sand when fertilised by that one spermatozoon, was already multiplying rapidly by division, having spent a restless two weeks in the womb, moving around, until finally fixing itself in one of the horns of the uterus at the end of that first fortnight. A week later, the first heartbeat was detectable.

      The Victorians liked to term pregnancy as a period of ‘confinement’, as if all activity was to be kept to a bare minimum – if that was the case it certainly didn’t apply to Kind. Or even her kind. Not all broodmares are retired racers – some are still in training, racing for the first third of their gestation. That will be for potentially as long as 100 days, as full term for a horse is generally regarded to be around 340 days or 11 months. And that time was to be spent largely unconfined.

      I imagined that the Juddmonte mares, with their valuable cargoes, would be kept in light, airy boxes monitored 24–7 by both people and science. After all, one in five pregnancies don’t end with a live foal. Should there be twins (a rarity in itself at 2.5 per cent of all pregnancies) the chances are grim, with only one in six resulting in the live birth of both foals. But for all the attendant risks, my imagination is way off-beam; Kind and Bullet Train live the life outdoors, in the quiet paddocks that stretch away and out into the far corners of the stud. They are not alone. The Banstead Manor team group-up mares and foals at similar points in their respective lives. It is part social – horses like it that way. If you ever catch a glimpse of the wild ponies on the heather heaths of the New Forest, you will see a similar thing as the herd divides into groups, grazing together with the immediate companions defined by age and disposition. It is also practical; pregnant mares are the adult group most susceptible to infection.

      Each morning they wait by the gate, not for the dawn but for food. Breakfast is the highlight of the day, followed by a couple of hours in the stable. A chance for the broodmare team to handle the foals. Check on their physical development. Pick up their feet. Trim their hooves. Adjust the collar to a growing head. This is the time to cement that physical bond between