It’s raining at Ascot. Good news for ducklings and their parents, bad news for Frankel fans.
There are lots of Frankel markets being bandied around these days: Frankel to win by five lengths or more, Frankel to be rated 141 or more after the race, Frankel to sire one Classic winner (or more), Frankel to race on next year, but I haven’t seen one yet on Frankel to run in the Qipco Champion Stakes. If you were betting on it this evening, you would probably bet long odds-on yes, but you would have at least one worried eye on the skies.
The hourly weather bulletins are important. Soft, heavy in places on the round course now, raining now and more showers to follow. 3mm since this afternoon, and possibly another 2mm before midnight. Teddy Grimthorpe says that he and the team are going to walk the track in the morning and make a decision. You still want to bet odds-on?
It’s all a little worrying, actually. This day has been building up to Frankel’s crescendo since the Juddmonte International really, since August. (Difficult to think height-of-summer now.) There was never any question of Frankel not taking part in Frankelday either (imagine Pancake Tuesday without the pancake), the QE2 or the Champion Stakes, that was the only decision that needed to be made once the faint Arc notion had been put to bed. Then it started to rain.
Team Frankel have been saying all week that soft ground wouldn’t be a problem, but yesterday they said that heavy ground might be, and that is worrying. There is a school of thought that says (and there are some people who say) that Frankel will be even better on very soft ground than he is on fast ground. It’s the Galileo/big feet argument. It’s a difficult one to buy into though.
The thing that differentiates Frankel from mere racehorses is his searing pace, his razor-sharp ability to burst his rivals with a turn of foot that takes him from the three-furlong pole to the one-furlong pole faster than any other member of his species. Very soft ground would surely blunt that ability at least a little. Also, very soft ground will be in favour of Cirrus Des Aigles and Nathaniel.
Frankel apart, it is a cracking day’s racing. Cityscape looks over-priced in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes. There may not be as much between him and Excelebration as respective odds of 1.9 and 5.6 suggest. True, Excelebration beat Cityscape when they met in the Prix Jacques le Marois at Deauville in August, but he only beat him by a length and a quarter, and there are a couple of reasons for thinking that Cityscape might just be able to reverse placings.
There is the ground for starters. Cityscape loves soft ground, whereas Excelebration just copes with it. The official ground description at Longchamp when Excelebration won the Prix du Moulin last year was very soft, but the times on the day suggest that the ground was actually good.
Then there is the stiff track which, combined with the ground, will place a premium on stamina. Whoever wins the QE2 will have seen out the one-mile trip well. Excelebration probably just gets a mile, he is probably a seven-furlong to one-mile horse, and notions of stepping him up in trip at the start of the season never came to fruition. By contrast, Cityscape gets a mile well, he won the Dubai Duty Free over nine furlongs, and a stiff test over a mile on soft ground is exactly what he wants.
Excelebration may well see out the trip on the ground well enough to prevail and, if he does, he probably will win. He is the classiest horse in the race. However, in the conditions, he shouldn’t be an odds-on shot in my book and Cityscape, who runs Ascot well, is value against him at current prices.
It might also be worthwhile take a chance on Slade Power in the Sprint at around 9.0. Society Rock and Wizz Kid set a high standard, and the former, in particular, is rock solid, back over six furlongs at his beloved Ascot and back on soft ground. Slade Power has to improve a lot on what he has achieved in order to get close to the big two, but there is every chance that he will.
Eddie Lynam’s horse has huge scope for progression. He has run just six times in his life, he has won four times and finished second twice. He has improved for every run since his seasonal debut, and he left the impression the last time we saw him that he was not done improving yet, not by a long way.
He only got home by a half a length in a listed race at Fairyhouse on that occasion, but the style of his victory was what impressed. He was wide around the home turn, but he travelled like a good horse through the race, he always looked the most likely winner. He picked up nicely when Wayne Lordan asked him to, and he gave the impression that he was only just doing enough. Back in fourth place that day was Gordon Lord Byron, who went on to win a listed race at York, to finish second in the Haydock Sprint Cup, and to win the Prix de la Foret at Longchamp two weeks ago. It’s solid form.
The other pleasing aspect to that run by Slade Power was that it proved that he could handle soft ground, a quality that his trainer wasn’t certain that he possessed before then. A strongly-run six furlongs suits him well, he can handle all types of terrain, including Polytrack, which is no liability to take with you to Ascot these days, and he is drawn close to early-pace horses Libranno and Jimmy Styles, so he should get a nice tow into the race.
It is a little bit of a worry that we haven’t seen him since Fairyhouse, back in July, but he was on track for the Haydock Sprint Cup before a slight setback ruled him out. That tells you that Lynam has considered him a Group 1 sprinter since then at least, and the trainer should know what a Group 1 sprinter looks like, given his excellent handling of Sole Power in recent years.
Slade Power goes well fresh, and you can be sure that he has been trained for this race since his trainer knew that he was going to miss Haydock. He comes into the race fresher than most and it wouldn’t be surprising to see him run a big race.
Without Frankel, it’s a cracking day’s racing. With Frankel, it’s just about as good as flat racing gets.
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