Glorious swansong for one of Britain's greatest trainers

IT seems a strange thing to dwell on now, but in early 2006, Sir Henry Cecil's training career looked to be over.

His Warren Place yard, which had produced 23 classic winners, was an empty shell, with Cecil forced to rent out some of his boxes to his neighbours. He no longer featured in the list of the top 50 trainers in the country, such was the lack of top-class talent at his disposal. And his personal life, which had always involved heavy drinking, was in turmoil following his separation from his second wife, Natalie, and a recent diagnosis of stomach cancer.

"When you're not having winners, you go out of fashion, and I began to go out of fashion," said Cecil. "People said I'd lost interest because of my personal life. That was never true, but in the end I did get quite demoralised and depressed. I didn't have the horses."

Light Shift's victory in the 2007 Oaks hinted at a revival, but in truth, even Cecil's staunchest admirers viewed it as a final hurrah. Then along came a horse called Frankel.

The career of the most popular and successful trainer of the latter half of the twentieth century can never be boiled down to the achievements of just one horse, but it is nevertheless true to say that Frankel arrived at the most unexpected of moments to provide thrilling and conclusive proof of Cecil's brilliance.

Unarguably one of the greatest racehorses ever seen, Frankel won all 14 of his races, a sequence that featured a truly brilliant display in the 2,000 Guineas and a remarkably facile victory in the Juddmonte International at York.

Henry Cecil greets Frankel after his victory in the Juddmonte International Stakes during day one of the 2012 Ebor Festival at York Racecourse

Racing in the colours of Prince Khalid Abdulla, the patron who, above all others, stood by Cecil through his dark days, Frankel thrilled the racing world.

More pertinently, he also brought a smile back to the face of his trainer. Pained and frail as the effects of multiple doses of chemotherapy took hold, Cecil was briefly returned to the theatrical, somewhat decadent, character who had captivated the racing public in his pomp, chatting nonchalantly to his owners, binoculars draped over his arm with cigarette in hand.

For an all-too-brief period, Cecil had reclaimed centre stage. Never was a return to prominence more popular or deserved.

BORN in Aberdeen in January 1943, ten minutes ahead of his twin brother, David, Cecil never saw his father as he had been killed in action a fortnight earlier with the Parachute Regiment in north Africa.

His mother, Rohays, remarried Captain Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, a five-time champion trainer, shortly after Henry was born, and at the age of 19, the elder of the two twin brothers began work as an assistant at his stepfather's stable in Newmarket.

In 1968, Boyd-Rochfort retired and Cecil took over the remaining members of the string at Freemason Lodge.

Success was anything but instant - "I was tired of hearing people say, 'He couldn't train ivy up a wall'," remembered Cecil in his biography - but the young aspirant was able to celebrate his first winner when Celestial Cloud obliged at Ripon, and he quickly claimed his first group race when Wolver Hollow won the Eclipse at Sandown.

In 1969, Cecil and his first wife, Julie, set up on their own and six years later, the pair saddled their first classic winner when Bolkonski won the 2,000 Guineas.

At the end of 1976, Cecil bought Warren Place and, shortly after, appointed Lester Piggott as his stable jockey, a partnership that lasted six years before Steve Cauthen assumed the role.

Throughout the 1980s, Cecil's string was all but unbeatable, with the likes of Derby winners Slip Anchor and Reference Point, and Oaks champions Oh So Sharp, Diminuendo and Snow Bride, becoming household names.

It looked like the ten-time champion trainer would be at the top of his sport forever, but while the 1990s witnessed further Derby wins courtesy of Commander In Chief and Oath, Cecil's star gradually began to wane.

FROM a racing point of view, much of Cecil's decline can be traced to a virus which took hold of his yard in the late 1990s and took the best part of four years to eradicate.

A number of his established owner-breeders began to look elsewhere, while one of his key patrons, Sheikh Mohammed, turned to Sir Michael Stoute before setting up his own training and breeding operation under the banner of Godolphin.

To make matters worse, Cecil's personal life was also in turmoil. He struggled to deal with the death of his twin brother, David, from cancer in 2000, and he suffered a messy break-up of his second marriage when press reports suggested his wife had been having an affair with a jockey.

A diagnosis of stomach cancer provided a further challenge, and Cecil began to devote more of his time and money to Cliff Stud, a breeding operation based at Helmsley, in North Yorkshire, that he had acquired in the 1980s.

David ran Cliff Stud for the best part of two decades, helping to rear European classic winners such as Filia Ardross and Rafha, and following his brother's death, Henry assumed a much more hands-on role in the establishment.

Yet he never gave up hope of a return to the glory days at Warren Place, and after giving up drinking he married Jane McKeown, sister of former jockey Richard Guest, in 2008. His stable strength returned to 150, and in 2011, he was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

By that point, of course, the horse that would provide the most glorious of swansongs had arrived.

SO many images of Frankel remain seared on the memory, but perhaps the most evocative is of Cecil, in a trademark brown fedora, gently stroking the colt's mane after he had claimed his final victory in Ascot's Champions Stakes.

It was an act of acknowledgment, but also of affection, a trait that helps explain why Cecil was always the darling of the betting ring.

As his record attests, he knew how to train a winner. But even as his health began to deteriorate to unsustainable levels, he never lost his love of horses or his vitality when it came to his sport.

Thanks to Frankel, Cecil had been able to keep the best for last. In a career as successful as his, that was surely his greatest achievement.