Newmarket Racecourse will play host to the 1,000 and 2,000 Guineas this weekend – with a certain 2011 winner becoming the first horse to be inducted into the British Champions Series Hall of Fame.
The Legendary Frankel, who claimed the most emphatic 2,000 Guineas victory seen at flat racing HQ, has been joined by 11-time champion flat jockey, Lester Piggott as the first pair to be inducted as ‘hall of famers’.
Frankel, son of the legendary sire and Derby winner Galileo, won all 14 of his career starts – with his 2011 Guineas win leading to successive wins in the St James’s Palace Stakes at Royal Ascot, the Sussex Stakes at Goodwood and the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes on QIPCO British Champions Day.
His owner, Prince Khalid Abdullah, decided not to send him to stud at the end of 2011, and he went on to take the Lockinge, Queen Anne, another Sussex Stakes and the Juddmonte – among his career tally of 10 Group 1 victories.
With his Dewhurst win at two, he became the first horse in 60 years to be a champion two, three and four-year-old.
Frankel’s career ended with a win in the 2012 Champion Stakes, and the 13-year-old now stands at Banstead Manor Stud – commanding a covering fee of £175,000.
The late Henry Cecil, who trained Frankel, said about the superstar – following his final victory: “I cannot believe in the history of racing that there has ever been a better racehorse”.
Piggott, who joins Frankel, spent five decades in the saddle – with his first win coming at just the age of 12 – and is regarded by many as the best jockey of all-time.
During that time, he won 4,493 races – thirty of those classics, including an unprecedented nine Derby successes, and a Triple Crown in 1970 with Nijinsky (Guineas, Derby & St Leger) – a feat which has not been achieved since.
In 2019, Her Majesty The Queen unveiled a statue of Piggott at Epsom racecourse, the home of The Derby.
The Guineas meeting takes place at Newmarket this Saturday, May 1 – Sunday, May 2. Will we see another potential superstar?