It was always going to happen one day, and on Saturday afternoon the moment finally arrived. A little less than 10 years after Frankel completed a 14-race unbeaten career in October 2012, Baaeed’s name was dropped into the same sentence as Sir Henry Cecil’s great champion, following his breathtaking success in the Lockinge Stakes at Newbury.
It went little further than a general acknowledgement that Baaeed may be the “best since” Frankel, on a British racecourse at least, while Angus Gold, racing manager for the Shadwell operation which owns the four-year-old, cautiously suggested to the Racing Post that he was “‘not going to say he’s in that class yet because Frankel is the best I’ve ever seen, although he’s heading in that direction.”
But for as long as Baaeed keeps winning – and on the evidence of Saturday there is nothing among the older horses at least that can give him a serious race – the comparisons will continue, not least because his route through the season could well be a near-facsimile of Frankel’s four-year-old campaign.
Next up for the unbeaten winner of seven races is the Queen Anne Stakes, the first race at the Royal meeting next month, in which Frankel produced the greatest performance of his career a decade ago. William Haggas will also look to step him up to a mile-and-a-quarter later in the season, probably in the International Stakes at York in August, in which, as the trainer pointed out on Saturday, Frankel was “arguably … at his most imperious” in 2012.
If Baaeed’s win streak remains intact, the Champion Stakes at Ascot would then be the obvious place to conclude his career, just 16 months after it began at Leicester in June 2021. The dream that one day they might breed the perfect, unbeatable racehorse has kept owners and breeders in the Flat racing game for centuries, and for a great deal longer than there have been geneticists around, to explain why their quest is all but certain to end in disappointment.
Most of the truly great horses of recent decades have endured at least one defeat. Timeform has awarded a rating of 140 or above to 13 horses since 1948, and just two – Frankel and Ribot – went through their entire careers unbeaten. Sea-Bird II, Brigadier Gerard, Mill Reef, Dancing Brave, Sea The Stars (the sire of Baeed), Shergar and Dubai Millennium are among the 11 who did not. None of those great horses were diminished by defeat.
Brigadier Gerard was unbeaten in 15 starts when Roberto beat him at York in 1972, while Sea The Stars’ only reverse came on his two-year-old debut. But at the same time, the fact that Baaeed is still unbeaten after seven trips to the track can only add to the buzz and anticipation as his four-year-old season unfolds. As yet, he can only be one of the best of recent years, and not recent decades, and his revised Timeform mark of 134 is nearly a stone adrift of Frankel (147).
The best Flat horse in living memory was also notable for his extraordinary ability to produce 140+ performances time and time again, something that Baaeed will surely find impossible to match in the limited time available.
A relatively late start to his racing career also means that Haggas’s colt never got the chance to get a Classic or juvenile Group victory on his CV. These are just a few of the reasons why any mention of Frankel set the bar at a height that Baaeed cannot clear. None of us, after all, can reasonably expect to see two horses of Frankel’s quality in a single lifetime.
But you can always hope, as generations of owners, breeders and fans have done for centuries. For as long as Baaeed has that air of “invincibility” about him, the comparisons will keep on coming.