Some champions win the big ones and lose the odd race along the way. A tiny few never lose at all. Frankel is the rarest kind of great: a flat racehorse who ran fourteen times, won fourteen times, and retired with his perfect record intact and his reputation as, for many, the best there has ever been.
A champion's pedigree
Frankel was foaled in February 2008, bred and owned by Khalid Abdullah's Juddmonte. He was by the outstanding stallion Galileo, out of the speedy mare Kind, a blend of class and stamina on one side and raw speed on the other. He was named after the late American trainer Bobby Frankel.
He was trained throughout his career by the legendary Sir Henry Cecil and ridden in every one of his races by Tom Queally, a partnership that became one of the most famous in the sport.
The unbeaten run
Frankel raced from 2010 to 2012 and simply never met his match. His record reads 14 starts, 14 wins, with ten of those at Group 1, the highest level in the sport. Two performances stand out even among the rest:
- 2000 Guineas, 2011. In the season's first colts' Classic at Newmarket, Frankel went off hard from the front and destroyed a top-class field, winning by six lengths in a display still talked about as one of the greatest a British racecourse has seen.
- Queen Anne Stakes, Royal Ascot, 2012. As a four-year-old at his peak, he produced a performance for the ages, winning by an astonishing eleven lengths against the best milers around.
He won championship races including the Sussex Stakes (twice), the Lockinge, the Juddmonte International at York over a mile and a quarter, and signed off with victory in the Champion Stakes at Ascot in October 2012 before being retired.
The highest rating ever
Numbers back up the eye. The independent ratings firm Timeform gave Frankel a peak mark of 147, the highest figure it has ever awarded to a flat racehorse in its long history. By that measure, Frankel is not just one of the greats. He is, on the clock and on the page, the best ever rated.
Henry Cecil's last great horse
Frankel's story is bound up with that of his trainer. Sir Henry Cecil, one of the most gifted and beloved trainers in British racing, guided Frankel through his unbeaten career while fighting serious illness. Cecil was knighted in 2011 and died in June 2013, not long after Frankel's retirement. The pair gave the sport one of its most emotional and enduring chapters.
A second career at stud
Frankel retired sound and unbeaten in late 2012 and took up stallion duties at Juddmonte's Banstead Manor Stud. There he has proved that his brilliance carries down the generations: his offspring have won major races across Britain, Ireland and around the world, making him one of the most important sires of his era as well as one of its greatest racehorses.
Why Frankel still matters
Debate about the "greatest of all time" never really ends, and names like Sea The Stars, Brigadier Gerard and Dancing Brave all have their champions. But Frankel's case is uniquely simple: he never lost, he was rated higher than any flat horse before him, and at his best he beat top-level rivals by margins that left even hardened racing folk lost for words. For a generation of fans, he is the standard against which every other is measured.
For more of the sport's legends, see our guide to the greatest racehorses of all time, and the story of jump racing's own immortal, Red Rum.