He was distracted by the “girls” when beaten on his last outing at Ascot, but Frankel’s son Cracksman will be looking to finish his racing career in style on the most valuable day of racing in the UK calendar.
Ascot’s $5.67 million Champions Day brings down the curtain on the British flat racing season with five end-of-season championship races featuring some of the cream of Europe’s equine talent.
The showpiece of Saturday’s blue riband meeting is the $1.7 million middle-distance Champion Stakes in which holder Cracksman will be bidding to go out on a high in what could be his final race before a life at stud.
The John Gosden-trained four-year-old was from the great Frankel’s first crop of foals and the big hope to land his illustrious father his first Classic winner as a sire.
And although Cracksman fell just short of a top prize (he was third in last year’s Derby) a second Champion Stakes, which his father won in 2012, would cap a still impressive career.
Cracksman, who was rated as the world’s best three-year-old after a string of Group One wins in 2017, has won more than $1.8 million on the track.
It was his Champion Stakes victory 12 months ago – the first Group One win for a Frankel offspring – which enabled Frankel’s stud fee to rise from $165,000 to $230,000 per cover.
Frankel clinched his 14th and final consecutive victory in the Champion Stakes in 2012 to take his career race winnings to nearly $4 million. He retired to stud in Suffolk in 2013.
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‘Fabulous horse’
Despite a shock defeat on his last outing at Royal Ascot in June, the recent rain in the south of England will suit Cracksman, who will team up again with veteran Italian jockey Frankie Dettori.
“It’s not been an easy year for Cracksman and the driest summer since 1976 was no help to him but he’s a fabulous horse. I don’t think he’s descended, so much as he’s hit rather a plateau,” the prolific Newmarket-based Gosden told AtTheRaces.
“He’s in top order. It’s hard to criticize a horse who has won two Group Ones this year and been second in a Prince of Wales at Royal Ascot in a very good time on fast ground, but he wasn’t quite mentally with us that day.
“He got very interested in the girls [fillies] coming back from the Windsor Forest [Stakes]. They were walking back into the stables and on a hot day and were sweaty. He obviously caught a little whiff of them and was rather keen to get over the hedge and say hello to them.”
The mile-and-a quarter Champion Stakes, with a first prize of $969,000, was first run in 1877 and held at Newmarket before it transferred to Ascot in 2011 as the culmination of the middle-distance season and the jewel in the crown of the newly created British Champions Day.
Sir Michael Stoute’s Crystal Ocean and Aidan O’Brien’s 2017 St Leger winner Capri, who was fifth in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe behind Gosden’s Enable, could be the big challengers.
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Roaring Lion
Because of the softening ground, Cracksman’s stablemate Roaring Lion – a winner of three Group Ones this season – will be redirected from the Champion Stakes to the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, Europe’s richest mile race with $1.4 million up for grabs.
The straight mile race, also won by Frankel on the inaugural Champions Day in 2011, formed the third leg of Dettori’s “Magnificent Seven” when he achieved the unprecedented feat of winning all seven races on the card.
But while Dettori rode Gosden’s Persuasive to victory last year, Roaring Lion will be ridden by in-form Irish jockey Oisin Murphy.
Roaring Lion’s entry gives Gosden potentially the favorite in four of the five main races, with Stradivarius in the Long Distance Cup and Lah Ti Dar in the Fillies and Mares Stakes.
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One race that could elude Gosden is the Sprint Stakes, in which trainer James Fanshawe’s The Tin Man, the 2016 winner, is the favorite.
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“To have a runner with a good chance in one of the big races on QIPCO British Champions Day is exciting and what we all strive for,” said the Newmarket-based Fanshawe.
