Racing / Breeders' Cup 1992: Fame fades to anonymity in Florida sun: Atlantic crossing has diminished the Derby winner of 1990 but this year's Guineas victor has already adapted. Paul Hayward reports

THE BIG bay animal shivering and crunching his bit under a rinse-down outside Bobby Frankel's training yard here is just another resting runner until you spot the small nameplate on his bridle. It says 'Quest For Fame', and if it carried the full significance of that inscription it would also read: 'Derby winner - 1990'.

Nobody asks Frankel about Quest For Fame when they come to inquire about the trainer's chances of winning Breeders' Cup races tomorrow. They ask about Defensive Play and Marquetry, his runners in the Classic, but not the gifted but inconsistent import who swept round Tattenham Corner and up Epsom's straight just two years ago. Derby winner? So what.

First they maligned Quest For Fame, then they forgot him. When he won the Grade One Hollywood Turf Handicap in May (his record in America is seven races, three victories) there was hope that he would soon cease to be the most denigrated Derby winner since Snow Knight, in 1974, but then he hit traffic and health problems, most recently in the Arlington Million, and on Saturday in the Turf he will start a 10-1 shot in a field of 10.

Quest For Fame still carries the colours of Khalid Abdullah he bore in the Derby, but Frankel is not typical of the Saudi owner's trainers. He is a 51-year-old New Yorker (Brooklyn accent) who started as a horse-walker, a groom, at Belmont Park and Aqueduct in the mid-1960s and earned the nickname 'king of the claimers' by developing selling platers into major league athletes. While he stands here talking freely in jeans and a casual shirt, another of Abdullah's trainers, Andre Fabre, is to be found making his terse rounds in immaculately ironed and expensive Parisian clothes.

Frankel remembers the day Abdullah's team phoned him with the offer of ex-European horses to train. 'Juddmonte (Abdullah's stud company) just called me out of the blue. They said they ran the California trainers through a computer to check their results, and my name came out on top along with Ron McAnally's,' he says. 'So I was picked out of a computer.'

All At Sea, Storm Dove, Modernise, Skimble, Toussaud, Contested Bid and possibly Jolypha; all these will be residents of Frankel's barns this winter as he hones 20 of Abdullah's stock ('I'm hoping for another 11 or 12') for the much richer prizes of American racing. 'I think it's the best job in the world. I'm thrilled every time they pick up the phone and send me another horse,' he says, intending this, perhaps, to be a memo to Abdullah's racing manager, Grant Pritchard-Gordon, in London.

Smart people these trainers. Take, for another example, Mike Puhich, who has guided one of Quest For Fame's rivals, Daros, into the Turf from a much less distinguished background. Thumb the British form book for the all- weather meetings at Southwell on 26 February and 14 March and you will find Daros winning the Clapwell Stakes and the Smokescreen Handicap for the Lynda Ramsden stable, and yet here he is chugging his way round Gulfstream in preparation for a dollars 2m ( pounds 1.29m) race.

Daros, by the way, was purchased for American racing by a man called Murray Friedlander, who also bought Dr Devious for Sidney and Jenny Craig, so if you fancy cleaning up at next year's Breeders' Cup simply contact the aforesaid Mr Friedlander with a mandate to buy.

Sometimes it feels like Britain out here, with ex-British horses filling the fields, failed British jockeys riding the work and the sons of British trainers supplementing their educations in American barns.

The language is different, though. Frankel says of Quest For Fame, 'he's training real nice and he looks better than at any time since I had him', and around the horse Latin American voices discuss his prospects for a resurrection on Saturday. At least he will always have that nameplate.

In yesterday's report an error in transmission gave the impression that Michael Roberts will ride all Peter Chapple-Hyam's runners at Gulfsteam Park. In fact he partners Corrupt in the Turf for Chapple-Hyam and Love Of Silver in the Juvenile Fillies race for Clive Brittain.

(Photograph omitted)