A flying finish for Frankie!
FIFTY yards apart at Ascot are two statues – one of wonder- horse Frankel and the other this track’s f avourite j ockey- s on Frankie Dettori.
Yesterday the duo combined to provide a fitting finale to £4.3million British Champions Day when 13- 8 favourite Cracksman romped to a seven-length win in the feature Champion Stakes.
With perfect symmetry, the John Gosden-trained colt, which carries the colours of owner Anthony Oppenheimer, claimed the first win in a Group One race in Europe for a horse sired by Frankel.
And it was the race in which Frankel ended his unbeaten 14contest career in 2012.
For Dettori it was also a first success in one of the few Group One races that had eluded him.
It came 40 minutes after he had pulled off an unexpected victory on Gosden’s 8-1 shot Persuasive in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes.
That was a sixth victory in a race in which Dettori landed his first career Group One win in 1990 on Luca Cumani’s Markofdistinction.
At the start of the month, Dettori milked the crowds at Chantilly after landing the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe on the Gosden-trained Enable.
The 46- year- old Italian again orchestrated the Berkshire crowd of more than 31,000.
On any other day, Aidan O’Brien equalling the record for Group One wins in a year when Ryan Mooreridden Hydrangea took him to 25 with victory in the Fillies & Mares Turf would have been a certainty to grab the headlines.
That or Si l vestre De Sousa landing his second jockeys’ championship.
But neither the Brazilian rider nor Ireland’s dominant trainer, near invisible on the track, is a match for Dettori in the showman stakes.
Cracksman, third in the Derby and second in the Irish Derby, had plenty to prove dropping back two furlongs in trip, having won the Great Voltigeur Stakes and Prix Niel over a mile and a half.
But he ended up treating his rivals with the sort of disdain his sire held for his contemporaries as he pulled clear of Poet’s Word and Highland Reel. Dettori said: ‘ Enable and Cracksman in the same year? Well done, John Gosden. He’s a genius.
Big credit to the Oppenheimers and John Gosden and his team for making Cracksman develop. The horse I rode today is not the horse I rode at Epsom.
‘I played my ace and it was catch me if you can. I had a cheeky glance at the big screen and he was clear. It was a storming performance and a thrill for everyone. I had a nice chat with Her Majesty and it has been a good day all round.
‘I didn’t expect Persuasive to win but I didn’t sleep very well because I felt Cracksman was in really good shape.’
In the aftermath of Enable’s Arc win, Gosden had mused that had he also run Cracksman, the colt would have finished in the first three. That seemed a bold statement until yesterday. The trainer will now have to plot campaigns for the pair in 2018, when he might not want them to meet until the Arc.
Gosden said of Cracksman: ‘He seems to have got bigger, stronger. It’s like a fighter weighing more. He started as a middleweight and is now a light-heavyweight. It’s great for Frankel to have a winner in the race he won.
‘It was a difficult decision not to run in the Arc but I felt Enable was more in t he zone, a bit more streetwise. I think it was right.’
Cracksman and Persuasive took Gosden to nine Group One wins this year and within £30,000 of cracking £6m in domestic prizemoney for the first time.
It has been a mammoth effort but that he trails O’Brien — who also won yesterday’s Group Two Long Distance Hurdle with Order of St George — by 16 Group One wins and over £ 1m in British prize money puts the Irishman’s figures into perspective.
On his record, O’Brien, crowned British champion for a sixth time, said: ‘It’s a big team effort. A lot goes into every horse. There are so many people I couldn’t name them. I’m delighted.’