Talking Horses: Unbeaten Baaeed’s run draws comparison with Frankel

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