Month: January 2022

The new year could scarcely have opened in more familiar fashion, with Bob Baffert not only winning the GIII Sham S. for an eighth time but replicating what had meanwhile become a bitterly poignant 1-2 in the race last year.

Hopefully the names of Newgrange (Violence) and Rockefeller (Medaglia d'Oro) will not end 2022 quite so explosively freighted as those of Life Is Good (Into Mischief) and Medina Spirit (Protonico), whose respective transfer and tragedy have meanwhile become so expressive of the travails not only of their trainer, but of our entire industry.

But the levels subsequently achieved by both those colts certainly reiterated the caliber of animal Baffert reserves for this race, which was 12 months earlier chosen to launch a Horse of the Year campaign for Authentic (Into Mischief). Newgrange is duly guaranteed much attention in his quest to become the third consecutive GI Kentucky Derby winner (pending resolution of Medina Spirit's status) to graduate from the Sham.

We won't add, here, to the oceans of ink that will continue to flow on the ineligibility of Newgrange, as a resident of a barn banned by Churchill Downs, for the 10 Derby starting points that are supposed to be bestowed on the Sham winner. Instead let's just take a step back and consider what Newgrange's pedigree tells us about his potential; and what his emergence might do for the profile of his sire.

Violence has had an interesting stud career already, not least with his best horses to this point sharing what might seem an unexpected vocation as sprinters–albeit we should know, by this stage, not to make assumptions about the way his own sire, the beautiful Medaglia d'Oro, has channeled the legacy of an avowed turf influence in El Prado (Ire).

Though confined to just four starts, Violence was able to show a versatility of his own in terms of surface. Having started out on dirt in New York, winning on debut at Saratoga and then following up in the GII Nashua S., he shipped out to Hollywood Park to win the GI Futurity S. on synthetics.

Collared only by the subsequent Derby winner in the GII Fountain of Youth S., he unfortunately emerged out of that first defeat with a sesamoid fracture. Retired to Hill 'n' Dale at $15,000, Violence soon proved the star of the intake. Though he missed the 2017 freshman title by a few cents–the fortunes of champion Overanalyze, long since exported, stand in cautionary contrast–he was top by winners, and was rewarded by no fewer than 214 mares at a new fee of $25,000 the following spring. His maturing stock promptly elevated him to No. 1 second-crop sire across all indices, with eight stakes winners and 19 stakes performers. His third crop of yearlings borrowed that buzz, at an average $133,600, and his fee was hiked anew to $40,000.

But Violence then suffered a little stage fright. In 2019, he mustered just two stakes winners, and his yearling average sagged to $44,649. With his fee restored to $25,000 for 2020, Violence then steadied the ship with a spectacular, game-saving cluster of Grade I wins by colts from three different crops. The sophomore No Parole gave him a breakout success in the Woody Stephens S.; lightly raced 4-year-old Volatile added the Alfred G. Vanderbilt S.; and, though that colt was soon derailed, juvenile Dr. Schivel kept the conveyor turning in the Del Mar Futurity.

Dr. Schivel proved a crucial ally in 2021, too, ensuring that Violence's solitary graded success of the year came at the highest level in the Bing Crosby S., while only missing the GI Breeders' Cup Sprint by a nose. In the meantime, moreover, Violence had retrieved all his commercial energy. His 2020 yearlings rallied to $72,128, obviously in a challenging market; while his latest crop was right up to $116,352, crowned by a $950,000 colt sold to Repole Stables and St. Elias at the September Sale. (Auspiciously, his previous knockout score at auction, at $850,000, had turned out to be Volatile.)

That represents superb consolidation by a horse emerging from a tricky crossroads, and reflects twin factors: one, obviously, is the vogue generated by those three Grade I winners; the other is that his 2021 yearlings graduate from that single season at $40,000, when he covered 171 mares presumably deemed worthy of a raised fee.

The overall momentum of Violence is reflected in the way his book, having slipped to 86 after his tepid racetrack campaign in 2019, rallied last spring to 159. So while he does have a small bump in the road ahead, in terms of his likely juvenile footprint for 2023, the overall “pipeline” is looking pretty good: his sophomores for this year represent his biggest book; and his incoming juveniles, his best.

The big question raised by Newgrange is whether Violence can now add a two-turn, Classic dimension to his most accomplished stock. As we've noted, Medaglia d'Oro has long proved an influence for diversity–in terms of discipline as well as surface, with Astern (Aus), Vancouver (Aus) and Warrior's Reward among his leading sprinters. Besides his sire line, another factor could be the duplication of his sixth dam, Greentree matriarch Sunday Evening, behind his granddam, whose sire is out of one of her daughters. Besides recurring in the pedigree of several fast horses, notably Irish champion sprinter Bluebird (Storm Bird), Sunday Evening is also an ancestress of other luminous turf runners in Indian Skimmer (Storm Bird) and Henrythenavigator (Kingmambo).

Storm Bird, responsible for both Bluebird and Indian Skimmer in this family, obviously gave us a huge “crossover” influence in Storm Cat. And it was Storm Cat's serial matings with Hall of Famer Sky Beauty (Blushing Groom {Fr}) that gave us the second dam of Violence. Sky Beauty's Grade I-winning dam Maplejinsky, in turn, was by the venerable turf/stamina influence Nijinsky, while also being a half-sister to the flying Dayjur (Danzig). (Literally flying, in terms of his unforgettable transition to dirt at the Breeders' Cup.) Their dam Gold Beauty, a champion sprinter by Mr. Prospector, whose son Gone West is sire of Violence's dam–admittedly one of the weaker links in this regal maternal line, with a solitary success in a nine-furlong dirt maiden at four.

Bottom line is that there are strands here that would certainly make it feasible for Violence to stretch out his stock: his own sire has obviously given us some real monsters round two turns, unsurprisingly as a grandson of Sadler's Wells; while Maplejinsky also features behind some pretty sturdy operators (third dam of Point of Entry {Dynaformer}, for example). But the propensity of Violence to throw very fast horses, to this point, is equally coherent on both sides of his pedigree. So while he does have a Grade I winner over 10 furlongs in Argentina, it appears instructive that one of his first stars, Talk Veuve To Me, ended up reverting to sprints despite some pretty stout influences in her family.

Of course, a reputation for speed does Violence no commercial harm at all. But what are the prospects of Newgrange, who won his maiden at six and was not pressured at a mile, stretching out on the Derby trail?

Well, it will certainly help if he keeps getting the same obliging treatment accorded to so many Baffert speed horses. Newgrange was only the latest to be so indulged, setting leisurely fractions in the Sham and duly retaining ample gas to assert in the stretch.

One thing we can say for sure is that he was well found as a yearling, for $125,000 by SF/Starlight/Madaket (subsequently joined on the racecard by several other powerful interests) as deep as Hip 2474 in the Brookdale Sales consignment at the September Sale. He was co-bred with Jack Mandato by Black Rock Stables, who had raced Violence and evidently retain a stake in his stud career despite meanwhile dispersing much other stock.

Newgrange is out of the unraced Empire Maker mare Bella Chianti, herself co-bred with Stone Farm from Mandato's extremely useful and tough racemare Bella Chiarra (Phone Trick), winner of nine of 29 starts (chiefly around 8/9f) including the GII Rampart H. at Gulfstream.

All five of Bella Chianti's foals to have raced have won, albeit only Newgrange at a smart level. More auspicious, perhaps, is the fact that her full-sister, though herself a modest performer, is the dam of the tragic Amalfi Sunrise (Constitution), lost to laminitis after winning her only two starts a couple of years ago, including the GII Sorrento S. by six lengths. We'll never know how far Amalfi Sunrise might have stretched out, but she did look extremely brisk on what we saw. That makes it hard to be adamant that her dam's sister will be putting much of their sire's Belmont-winning stamina into the Newgrange equation. (Be that as it may, Empire Maker certainly has an increasing legacy as a broodmare sire, newly enhanced in 2021 by Silver State {Hard Spun}, Mandaloun {Into Mischief} and Rock Your World {Candy Ride (Arg)}.)

Newgrange's third dam is a stakes-sprinting daughter of the obscure Maryland sire Count Brook out of a modest mare by an unraced son of Nearco (Ity) imported from Britain, River War (GB). Nonetheless she produced a couple of other accomplished performers besides Bella Chiarra: a dual graded stakes winner on turf, David Copperfield (Halo), plus the hardy Young At Heart, twice beaten only narrowly in Grade II dirt sprints–despite being by Ferdinand.

You have to go back quite a long way to find where this trio might have dredged any genetic class: to the 1922 foal Primrose, in fact, as a Jerome H.-winning half-sister to a Travers winner. And, even as one who likes to unpick the deeper mesh of pedigrees, I'm not going to suggest that Newgrange must owe an awful lot to his eighth dam!

The real nugget on Newgrange's page is plainly his granddam Bella Chiarra–and her sire Phone Trick, obviously a very quick horse himself, owes his principal broodmare laurels to two horses, Zensational and Dawn Approach (Ire), who were unusually dashing for sons of Unbridled's Song and New Approach (Ire), respectively.

The onus remains on Violence, then, to show that his glossy physical stamp relays not just speed but speed that can be carried at the highest level. Clearly Newgrange couldn't be in better hands, for those purposes. As such, he looks like an important horse in his sire's developing career.

With that pedigree behind him, and that robust physique out front, Violence is not just positioning himself as an affordable alternative to his sire. Arguably the three premier achievers by Medaglia d'Oro are two females, Rachel Alexandra and Songbird, and a gelding, Golden Sixty (Aus). While he's still reliably coming up with class horses, and Rockefeller may yet become another, Medaglia d'Oro has now turned 23 and his principal male heir has yet to be definitively anointed. Violence does face fresh competition, from the likes of Bolt d'Oro and Higher Power, but Newgrange could be the herald of a decisive new phase in his candidature.

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