Frankel: ‘Super stud’ stallion in demand for £125,000 a time

“His cruising speed was equivalent to a lot of horses going flat out, and he had an incredible stride on him,” said Grimthorpe.

“You can see when horses were trying to match strides, they had to take one-and-a-half strides to his one.

“If you look at his form, it was always franked. Horses beaten by him went on to win decent races.”

He is the son of 2001 Epsom Derby winner Galileo – now a prolific sire himself – and grandson of champion stallion Sadler’s Wells,

Frankel was champion aged two, three, and four. Those 14 victories included 10 at the highest Group One level, nine of which he won on the trot. And some at an apparent canter.

He was victorious in his Champion Stakes swansong despite facing Cirrus Des Aigles, the second top-rated horse in the world, on soft ground which played much more to his opponent’s strengths.

Little wonder then that despite his lofty stud fee, Frankel was oversubscribed, with more than 220 potential suitors from around the world.

Autumn brings about 30 mares from the southern hemisphere, including Australia, before a rest between November and February.

He completed his first set of bookings in June at around the time Cecil died after a six-year battle with cancer.

After the horse retired, the seriously ill Cecil would make weekly visits to see his one-time stable star at stud.

The trainer may have sadly gone, but his champion racehorse’s legacy is set to go on.

It all has a touch of Hollywood about it. The horse named after one training legend who helped another achieve the highlight of a racing life in the sickness-ravaged twilight of his career.

“The only way I can describe it is as an alignment of the stars. If you wrote the story as fiction, it would be rejected on the grounds it sounded like a fairytale,” said Grimthorpe.

With a standard 11-month pregnancy for mares, the first of Frankel’s offspring will arrive in the early months of 2014.

They will grace the track as two-year-olds in the summer of 2016, when Frankel’s name will appear in racecards as the sire of a new generation of equine talent.