Stoute, Cecil and the Dwindling Golden Age of Trainers

At the start of each season the late Sir Henry Cecil would buy a large notebook and divide its final pages into squares, “like a crossword puzzle,” to be filled in, one by one, when he trained a winner. Group wins were inked-in in colour.

Each victory would send him to the trainers' championship table in the Racing Post, to see whether he had moved up, or further “in front of Michael Stoute, or any nearer to John Gosden.”

With Sir Michael Stoute's last turf runner, at Nottingham last week, a golden age of racehorse trainers approached its end. Stoute, Gosden and Andre Fabre in France are all septuagenarians. Cecil, who was the Seb Coe to Stoute's Steve Ovett, the Barcelona to his Real Madrid, died in June 2013.

Stoute's longevity was a thing of wonder. When he started out in 1972 Richard Nixon swept aside George McGovern in the US Presidential election – 52 years before the return of Donald Trump. In the years in-between Stoute's first runner and Wanderlust trailing home last at Nottingham to bring down the curtain, he was champion trainer 10 times and won more than 4,000 races, including the Derby, six times, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, Japan Cup, Dubai World Cup, eight Breeders' Cup races and the Champion Hurdle with Kribensis.

The reason for revisiting one of the great Newmarket struggles is to honour an age in which the brilliance and charisma of individual trainers helped promote the sport

It's a truism of watching sport that we only realise what we had when it's gone. The long Cecil-Stoute duel was cloaked in Flat racing's outward civility. Other sports would have told you to pick your side: Cecil or Stoute – 'you can't be both' – in the way the great American sports columnist Rick Reilly wrote that you were either a 'Tiger [Woods] or a Phil [Mickelson] guy.'

The rivalry between Cecil and Stoute was real but mutually respectful. When I interviewed Cecil at Warren Place in 2011 for The Observer he had just been knighted, which brought him upsides Stoute (knighted in 1998) in the social stakes.

“We've always been very competitive together,” Cecil said in his study. “Then he moved in front, things deteriorated for me, I didn't have the horses, he was top of the list and I was right down. I went down to 149th, I think. He hated me winning when we were fighting to see who was going to be champion trainer. We're great friends now. We get on very well. I don't know whether he likes me more because I'm not such a nuisance.”

The reason for revisiting one of the great Newmarket struggles is to honour an age in which the brilliance and charisma of individual trainers helped promote the sport. It was certainly a gilded age for punters. Stoute and Cecil had legions of disciples who would support them as if they were football teams. You knew what you were getting with a bet on a Cecil or Stoute horse. It bought you not only a betting slip but entry to the ride they were on.

“At the height of their powers, Henry Cecil and he were formidable adversaries and lit up the British racing season year on year,” John Gosden affirmed when Stoute retired.

There are gifted and magnetic trainers still, of course. Gosden, 73, continues to bear the torch for his generation, with son Thady. Aidan O'Brien is a mercurial genius. Each leading trainer is a 'story', simply by virtue of their success. But the corporatisation of sport, together with the ravages of social media, have obscured the human element. Flair and personality are still there, just better hidden. Sir Mark Prescott – another half-centurion – is arguably the last 'character' standing from those who set down roots in the 1970s.

Stoute hated being interviewed and had no wish to be a celebrity. The turmoil of Cecil's personal life forced him into the public eye. He was a gossip columnist's dream. For Stoute, Shergar's brilliance and subsequent kidnapping at stud by the IRA guaranteed him immortality in the annals of huge and shocking news stories. Cecil meanwhile bequeathed a late-life masterpiece in Frankel, a story that would have stretched Hollywood's imagination. 'Trainer in his last months with cancer is lent the will to endure by best-ever horse who retires undefeated.' Try pitching that one.

They are still at it, the old devils. Andre Fabre, born in the year World War II ended, sent out this year's Arc favourite, Sosie. Fabre, who has been champion trainer in France 30 times, will be 80 next month. Sosie, who finished fourth, would have been his ninth Arc winner. Gosden first took out a licence in America in 1979 and can reflect on 45 years of conquest.

Only success can buy the kind of authority these trainers accumulated. Bruce Raymond, the former jockey and racing manager to Saeed Suhail among others, says: “When my owners talk about telling Sir Michael to do something, I say 'listen, Sir Michael Stoute has trained every winner in the world twice, I'm not going to tell him anything' – and he quite rightly probably wouldn't take any notice anyway.”

The top trainers manage upwards (to owners), sideways (to staff, vets, jockeys, the media and bloodstock agents) and 'downwards' to the horses, who are fragile and unpredictable. It's a maelstrom of stress few of us could deal with.

On my visit to Warren Place. Cecil showed me his collection of miniature knights and soldiers (pipe bands, mostly), which honoured his grandfather, who was commander in chief of the Gordon Highlanders. He recalled the late Queen marvelling at his array of knights, and him telling her: “The only one I haven't got is Michael Stoute.”

Rivals outlast one another. Stoute trained for another 11 years after Cecil's death. But in so much as they need each other to define their careers, they leave the stage as one.