“In life, people go through times when it’s not a bed of roses,” muses Sir Henry Cecil. “And I have too. I felt quite down, depressed, for quite a long time but had no intention of retiring as a has-been. It would have been pathetic. I like a challenge and you’ve got to ride the bad times, be positive. Overcome it.”
And what do you know? Here is the greatest racehorse trainer of his generation having overcome his challenge and now sitting amid beds upon glorious beds of roses in his Warren Place utopia.
“That’s good scent, yeah?” he says, plucking a pink flower and offering me a sniff. “Look at them, still flowering and lots of buds to come.”
He could be talking about his own sweet life, blossoming once more at, what age is it, Sir Henry? Sixty eight? “Oh, something like that,” he says with that inimitable mix of diffidence and insouciance. “At my stage of life, you’re as old as you feel.”
And he feels “juvenile”, he swears. “Not ready to retire yet.” You can try to drag him back six years to when the once unstoppable supply of winners had dried to a trickle, to when his alcoholic twin brother died of cancer, to when his private life was in turmoil, dragged through the public mud way beyond Newmarket.
Yet he will bring you resolutely back to his newly knighted good life, to a battle for an 11th champion trainer’s title and, of course, to his prize bloom, Frankel the wonder horse.
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