Trainer Henry Cecil loses brave battle with cancer

How much longer Henry Cecil lived due to Frankel is as unknowable as how the career of the racehorse regarded by many as the greatest ever seen might have turned out had he been trained by someone other than the legendary figure who lost his battle with cancer today aged 70. What's for definite is that each came to define the other in a story that lit up sport.

The stomach cancer that killed one of the most successful, accomplished and colourful figures in British racing history was diagnosed when the 10-time former trainer was at the bottom of a career-trough in the middle of the last decade, long before Frankel was even foaled.

And by the time Frankel made the first of his 14 unbeaten starts in 2010, the competitive steel that always lay underneath Cecil’s carefully cultivated dandyish image had defiantly propelled him back to the top.

But no one appreciated more the raw talent that fate seemingly handed Cecil even as illness continued to remorselessly sap his strength. That raw talent came with a combustible nature that threatened to divert Frankel's potential into just another fast-running morning glory. And it was the challenge of channelling that potential, moulding the youngster into all-time great of the turf that consumed Cecil in the last years of his life.

Racing folklore
The man nobly born Henry Richard Amehurst Cecil in Aberdeen in 1943 had secured a singular place in racing folklore anyway. Dismissed as something of a fey, morning-glory himself when starting his training career in 1969, Cecil confounded everyone's expectations by carving out a career that included 25 British Classic wins and six Irish Classics, beginning with his first Classic, Cloonagh in the 1,000 Guineas.

What he personally exuded on those Irish visits was the same off-beat self-effacing charm that the entire racing world came to appreciate, made even more attractive by evidence that for all the patrician privilege, Cecil could be as prone to life’s vagaries as anyone else.

Tabloid headlines surrounded his personal life and tragedy too, when his cherished twin-brother succumbed to cancer. He admitted to financial pressures when the halcyon days of the 1970’s and 1980’s faded and Cecil became widely dismissed as a has-been.

One year the Warren Place yard that produced four Derby victors and eight Oaks heroines, and which had provided ammunition for Piggott, Eddery, Cauthen and Kinane could only produce a dozen winners.

Cecil always said he trained by feel, an instinctive gift that often revolved around letting horses tell him the best way to proceed. Frankel though had to be told, repeatedly, what not to do, which was to stop trying to get from A to B flat out from the start.

Classic stage
When he announced his talent on the Classic stage in the 2,000 Guineas of 2011, it was with a free-wheeling front-running rout that left jockey Tom Queally looking like a passenger and had wise sages shaking their heads about the future.

All too aware of the need to train the freakish talent mentally as much as physically, Cecil ignored criticism by avoiding the Derby and sculpted his living, breathing masterpiece for two unbeaten years with the sure touch of a virtuoso.

By the end Frankel was as close to a perfect racehorse as most any of us will see. By the end the impact of illness on his trainer was all too obvious.

There’s a dreadful symmetry about Cecil passing away just eight months after Frankel left Warren Place for good. But there’s a synchronicity there too. And the consoling thought is that Cecil will have known in those final months that his perfect work guarantees him racing immortality.