Anyone who was at Newmarket on the 30th April 2011 will never forget what they saw. One of the most iconic moments in horse racing history.
Frankel was known to be keen coming into the race, so much so that Rerouted, who was in the same ownership, was deployed as a pacemaker, but he would have had to have been champion sprinter material to have performed that job. Frankel had a ground-devouring stride when allowed to use himself and his jockey Tom Queally quickly signalled his intention not to mess about, letting him bowl along from the start.
He was quickly clear, burning up the Rowley Mile at a gallop that was seemingly comfortable for him but too strong for his rivals to cope with. According to Timeform, Frankel took around 47.5 seconds to reach the halfway point - that's the sort of pace more likely to be seen in a top-class sprint than in a race over a mile. Indeed, he covered the first five furlongs in a time more than a second faster than the winner’s time in the Palace House Stakes (five furlongs) 35 minutes later.
The astonishment of the crowd, and no doubt everyone watching at home, was mirrored by commentator Ian Bartlett who exclaimed, "At The Bushes, Frankel, he's 15 lengths clear!". The 2000 Guineas had been turned into a procession by a horse who would go on to become the greatest of all time.
Timeform report on the race:
"Frankel is on the threshold of becoming one of the greatest Flat racehorses in Timeform's history, no other way to put it after a performance in which even the huge rating from the bare facts of the result doesn't do him full justice; it takes something extraordinary to do what he did, shades of Dubai Millennium in the World Cup and Hawk Wing in the Lockinge from recent memory, only that pair were both fully-mature 4-y-os on their landmark day, and comparatively Frankel went harder sooner in his defining race; in an attacking policy, refreshing to see but needing a special horse to pull it off, he was more or less let loose from the start, rolling along at a speed that looked comfortable to him but none of the others could cope with, to the extent he was well clear by halfway, and just as impressive was the way he kept up the gallop, the outspread field in behind - amongst them several Group 1 winners who had a brief go at pursuit - a testimony to him; indeed, breaking it into sectional times as best we could does strongly suggest that Frankel overdid things in the first half of the race, covering the furlongs like a top-notch sprinter, which inevitably told on him late on even though he still won by a clear-cut margin, leading us to believe that he's even better than the bare form of the race; it's hard to see what can stop him over a mile, even in something of a golden age with the likes of Canford Cliffs and Goldikova around, and the suspicion is that Frankel could outrun the best sprinters, too, if given the chance. Frankel has to be lauded and savoured as one of the all-time greats of the sport, potentially the best there has ever been"