FRANKEL took the racing world by storm during an unbeaten career, but one man who was not entirely surprised was Roger Charlton. The horse of the age was sired by Galileo, the 2001 Derby winner, who has been champion sire for seven of the previous eight years. But the X factor that made Frankel so special, and hopefully will be passed on by him as a sire, could be traced back to his dam.
Kind was trained by Charlton but she never quite hit the heights the trainer had hoped for. However, believes Fair Eva, from Frankel’s first crop of three-year-olds, might do that in the Qipco 1000 Guineas at Newmarket today.
Owned, like Frankel and Fair Eva, by Prince Khalid Abdullah, Kind, won six of 13 starts but it was a case of what might have been.
“She was a beautiful, big, strong, good-looking typical Danehill filly,” Charlton recalled. “I had aspirations that she might be a Guineas filly. She got beaten first time over seven furlongs at Newmarket and she never really settled properly. If I’d been a bit cleverer, I’d have probably put a hood on her, which has suited quite a lot of Frankel's offspring to help them relax.
“She had a lot of speed and impatience and she ended up running five and six furlongs where she should have been bred to stay a mile. She was very talented – if she’d settled she’d have been a Group-winning filly. Sadly, she was also very hard to get in foal.
“But I think she put a bit of spark into the family. Galileo speaks for himself but Frankel could have won the July Cup and I think that came from her.”
Fair Eva showed she had inherited much of that talent when she became Frankel’s first Group-race winner at Ascot last July. She was beaten on her final two starts and the problem for Charlton is simple; get back to where she once belonged.
“I think the day she won at Ascot she produced a time figure that was better than any other two-year-old filly in Europe,” he said. “She needs to reproduce that performance to win the 1000 Guineas. What happened afterwards? I don’t know. We never found anything that wasn’t right.
“I have huge respect for the favourite [Rhododendron] but the trials have been a bit inconclusive so it’s an open year and there’s a whole lot of fillies who may improve or may not improve. I'm not going to say she'll win the Guineas, because that would be stupid to say, but she's where we want her to be.”
If that turns out to be the winner’s enclosure, Charlton will not be entirely surprised.
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