Balls To Pinatubo

Balls to Pinatubo and to the 2000 Guineas. Even if he wins I won’t give him his due. Nothing he can do today can make me put him in the same breath as Frankel, save one thing: obliteration. And even then, even if he takes the field by the throat and shakes it like the earthquake of Hezekiah, I still won’t bow the knee.

Today’s bunfight on Rowley Mile is being billed as the moment when Pinatubo will stride out and prove that he deserves his mark, that he is better than Frankel. This is bollocks. He can’t get near Frankel today.

Frankel murdered a top class Guineas field from the word go, a destructive gallop of such power that it is possibly the best Classic performance of all time, and certainly the best since Tudor Minstrel went for a jog some 73 years ago. Pinatubo could replicate this. His nine lengths win in the National Stakes show that, for all the whispers of him being a lazy sod on the gallops at home, when it matters he loves to run free and fast.

But even if he obliterates this very talented bunch of three-year olds, it doesn’t matter. The 2000 Guineas isn’t the end. Other horses have dominated Classics before. Slip Anchor ran his Classic like he had wings on his heels, so far in front of the Derby field that it was as if he was running a different race. It was almost a case of nominative determinism, as if Steve Cauthen has really slipped an anchor off him, and every other horse was hauling a lump curved steel along the racetrack. But we don’t talk about Slip Anchor in the same hushed tones as Frankel, because that Derby was the last of him. He got injured and never won another race.

The point of the Frankel mania (and I admit to being a maniac about him) is that he did it again and again. After his Guineas, he chinned Canford Cliffs at Goodwood , melted them during the Queen Anne, blew apart the Juddmonte International, and won a Champion Stakes on sheer guts when the soft ground blunted his speed.

A racehorse is measured on his career, not just one run. Like all athletes, they are creatures of retrospect. Today at least, Pinatubo cannot match Frankel. His body of work is not yet done.

Maybe I’ll change my mind. Good luck to Pinatubo, and to Charlie Appleby, whom seems like such a nice man. Good luck even to William Buick, who never wins when I back him. But for God’s sake, let’s take the pressure off. He can’t do it all today, and it is stupid to think he could.