Farewell Frankel

One of man’s sustaining joys, one of his anchors, is that, no matter how bleak things seem, if you look hard enough you will find magnificence all around you. No one will have to look too hard today.

At a few minutes after four o’clock Frankel, the greatest racehorse of the age, will run his last race — the Champion Stakes at Ascot. If, as is expected, he wins he will finish his career undefeated and with 14 wins. An almost unimaginable record.

The stallion — conservative estimates value him at €120m — was sired by Galileo, the Derby-winning son of Sadler’s Wells, who stands at Coolmore in Tipperary. His jockey is Dungarvan’s Tom Queally so we can, if we care to, all claim a tenuous link with the wonder horse.

Another of man’s sustaining joys is hope and though none of us can guess when the next Frankel will grace our racecourses it is fairly certain that one eventually will. Frankel’s owner, Khalid Abdullah, is working on the project already — Kind, Frankel’s dam is in foal.

Hope indeed springs eternal.