Simon Cooper - Frankel

Ahead of the Dublin rush-hour traffic the run to Coolmore, 115 miles to the southwest, is quick. The high windows of the horse box wouldn’t have afforded our pair the view that intrigued me so much as they drew close to their destination. In fact, they would have seen nothing until the side ramp was lowered, the internal panels swung back and they were led to their new, albeit temporary, home. Kind was back on Irish soil for the second time in a year.

Even though Lakeview Yard is reserved for the best broodmares visiting the best of the Coolmore stallions, it lacks the grandiosity of Kind’s regular home. It is functional rather than fancy. On three sides of a square are ranged twenty-five stables built of breeze blocks painted white with a low-pitched slate roof that surround a plain courtyard with a square of grass and a tree at the centre. The fourth side is half filled by a squat bungalow of similar construction in which the Lakeview Yard manager lives.

But nobody is here for the architecture. The beauty lies in the location. It is a quiet corner away from the hustle and bustle of stud life. All around are horse paddocks that run down to the lake, interspersed with clumps of woodland. There is not a public road in sight. The only people you’ll ever see are working or visiting the stud. You are largely sealed away from life as most people know it. Here, mothers fresh from giving birth have time and space to recuperate. Newly born foals are introduced to the world ever so gradually. It is all about calm. Routine. And care.

However, for all the wondrousness of this lifestyle, Kind is not here to raise her foal. She is here to create her next. Who will be the greatest of all time.

*In bloodstock terms the two horses are actually three-part brothers: in addition to sharing their mother, Kind, Frankel’s grandfather, Sadler’s Wells, was Bullet Train’s father.

3

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.