American idol: Bobby Frankel trained the winners of 3,655 races and accumulated a prize fund of $230million over the course of an illustrious career

Last Wednesday evening, while most of us were still sticking sharp needles in our Thierry Henry dolls while vowing never to eat another snail, an unremarkable three year-old chestnut filly called Life by RR won an inconsequental horse race at Hollywood Park in California.


She'd been entered in the race three days earlier in the name of her trainer Robert 'Bobby' Frankel, who by then understood that his battle with lymphoma had been lost and had returned home from hospital to spend his final days at his family home in Los Angeles.


By the time Life by RR scuttled home in that Hollywood claimer, Bobby Frankel was dead. This oddly-named horse proved to be the last official winner of what was by any standards a remarkable career in racing that began over half a century earlier in the grey hustling streets of Brooklyn and ended under the blue skies of California last Monday.


His character embraced the same dualities as his life story. Although he was one of the most prominent horse trainers in the world for several decades, there were plenty of people, most of them cowardly sports writers, who were terrified to even look at him such was his reputation for bad-tempered spikiness and so well aimed were his lacerating profanities.


But those that knew Frankel well swore that this was not him, rather just a convenient front to mask the decent and sensitive soul that he preferred to keep to himself. Many of his staff stayed loyal to him for more than 30 years and on one famous occasion he missed out on saddling a fancied runner in a classic to nurse his dying sheep dog. But he hated the scrutiny.


One trusted acquaintance made the mistake of emphasising this warmer side of Frankel during a speech at an awards ceremony once and was later savaged by the great man. "You f**kin' embarrassed me," complained Frankel on the way home. "You're right, Bobby," the friend argued back. "Heaven forbid that people don't think you're an asshole."


This has been an unkind year to the great racehorse trainers. The master of them all, Vincent O'Brien, Jimmy Fitzgerald and the great Hong Kong handler Ivan Allen have all departed to the heavenly furlongs. Statistically speaking at least, Frankel deserves his place among them.


Five times he won the Eclipse award for being outstanding trainer in America, a considerable achievement in a country with so many distributed training centres. Since he took out a licence in 1966, he trained the winners of 3,655 races and accumulated a prize fund of $230million which makes him second only to the legendary D Wayne Lukas in the all time lists.


Frankel trained 10 different horses to be national champions, including such greats as Aldebaran, Ginger Punch, Intercontinental, Ryafan, Squirtle Squirt, Wandesta and the brilliant Ghostzapper, who was horse of the year in 2004. He lies second in the list of the most successful Breeders Cup money-winning trainers and when Empire Maker won The Belmont in 2003 it was one of 25 Group One races he won that season – breaking the world record set by Aidan O'Brien two years earlier. In that season alone his stable banked $20m in prize money.


Not many winner factories like Frankel have emerged from the streets of downtown Brooklyn so his introduction to the world of horses was by betting on them. He discovered at a young age that he had a natural talent for handicapping races and used this skill to extremely profitable effect.


On one occasion in the early 1960s when he was barely out of his teens he went to his local track with $40 in his pocket and came home with over twenty grand. It took him about a week to convince his mother that he hadn't robbed a bank.


Frankel's ubiquitous presence at the track led to more conventional work as a trainer's assistant in New York and eventually he struck out on his own in 1966. Six years later he moved his increasingly successful operation to the west coast and immediately made a fortune by buying moderate horses cheaply, improving them and then winning truckloads of cash by betting on them. He became known as the 'King of the Claimers', but all the time he was sponging up information from established trainers and gradually better quality horses were added to his string, many of them running under the Juddmonte banner of Khalid Abdullah.


His inherent skill at judging form and people was to stand him in good stead throughout his career, both in terms of betting and in judging which races his horses had a better chance of winning. "You are playing a game," said Frankel in later years. "It's like playing one of those little games kids play – those computer games – trying to figure out what the next guy's move's going to be. You know these guys – you're handicapping the trainers."


From a specifically European viewpoint Frankel has left another legacy that may ultimately be more important to his sport than his long list of triumphs on the track. American racing is absolutely mired in drug abuse and horror stories abound. Leading trainer Patrick Biancone was banned from the sport for a year in 2007 for using cobra venom as a pain killer on his horses. Steve Asmussen, who trained both Curlin and Rachel Alexandra was suspended in Louisiana a year earlier when one of his horses tested 750 times over the legal limit for the local anesthetic, mepivacaine. And until fairly recently the use of anabolic steroids on race horses was legal in every state bar Iowa.


Rick Dutrow, the trainer of Big Brown, who won two of last year's Triple Crown races, openly boasted that his great colt was juiced to his eyeballs and surveys found that in some States over 60 per cent of all runners were on steroids.


Bobby Frankel was one of the few trainers that openly opposed their use and this year several of the big racing states such as Kentucky and New York have banned them completely. It's a small step forward, but Frankel's advocacy helped to make it happen. For this alone he should be warmly remembered, but you wouldn't have expected him to thank you for it.