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Bloodlines: Tiz The Law Puts Sire Constitution At The Head Of His Class

Tiz the Law's victory in the Grade 1 Belmont Stakes on June 20 made him the first grandson of multiple leading sire Tapit to win a classic, and the colt's success cemented his sire, Constitution, in a special place as the sire of the first classic winner from the freshman stallion crop of 2019.

Those horses include Horse of the Year American Pharoah (by Pioneerof the Nile), who was the leading freshman sire of 2019 over Constitution, with the Belmont Stakes winner Palace Malice (Curlin) and the speedy Liam's Map (Unbridled's Song) and Tapiture (Tapit) filling the first five spots.

In addition to getting multiple graded stakes winners last year, Constitution was represented by Grade 1 winner Tiz the Law, who won the Champagne Stakes at Belmont Park, and the sire's stock has shown considerable improvement through the early months of 2020, even with the limited racing available to them.

Constitution has three stakes winners this season and six stakes-placed, and the overall success of his racers has put him in first place among the second-crop sires of 2020 with earnings of $2.4 million, ahead of Honor Code (A.P. Indy) and American Pharoah in virtually the same slot with progeny earnings of $1.269 million and $1.262 million. Belmont Stakes winner Tonalist sits fourth with $1.2 million and fifth-place Khozan (Distorted Humor) fifth at slightly less than $1.2 million.

Tiz the Law leads all racers by Constitution with $1,133,300 in earnings this season.

The blaze-faced bay colt was bred in New York by Twin Creeks Farm and sold for $110,000 at the 2018 Fasig-Tipton sale of select New York-bred yearlings at Saratoga. Jack Knowlton of Sackatoga Stable was the buyer.

Six years earlier, Twin Creeks had bought the Kentucky-bred Constitution from WinStar Farm for $400,000 at the 2012 Saratoga select yearling sale conducted by Fasig-Tipton. WinStar retained a portion of the colt, who won the G1 Florida Derby and Donn Handicap, then retired to stand at stud on WinStar Farm outside Versailles, Ky.

“Constitution was a star yearling; in every way, he was so complete a package as potential racehorse that we wanted him badly enough to pay the price,” said Twin Creeks' Randy Gullatt. “At Saratoga, he had the presence and the pedigree to be a horse that you stretched for. He was just wonderful and then showed it on the racetrack.”

As a buyer Gullatt said, “I'm attracted to the well-muscled, good-sized, lengthy yearlings who are not overly heavy and who aren't soft in the pastern. I'm essentially looking for two-turn speed horses. American racing is geared around the 3-year-old prep season, and if you have a horse who's good at the end of his 2-year-old season, then he's likely to be able to progress and improve at three to challenge for the classics through the early-season preps.”

That's what Constitution did, and although he missed the classics himself, the scopy bay son of classic sire Tapit has marked out some Triple Crown territory for himself with Tiz the Law.

In comparing the sire and the son, Gullatt said, “Constitution was a very different horse early on from Tiz the Law. Constitution was a big, grand-looking yearling. In contrast, Tiz the Law was a little smaller. He was an average-sized yearling and stands 15.3 3/4 [hands], I was told over the weekend. He was a really smart young horse who never had a bad day, was very willing to learn, very easy to work with, possessed a great mind and attitude.

“However, Tiz the Law wasn't the typical star yearling that buyers spend a ton of money on at the sale. That's what a lot of the Constitutions were like at the sales; as a result, they sold well but not outside of the norm of expectations.”

The Belmont Stakes winner himself sold for $110,000, which ranked him 15th among the 82 sales yearlings by Constitution, and his price compared quite favorably to the sire's yearling average of $68,152 in 2018.

Those numbers will be adjusting noticeably in 2020.

From a first-season stud fee of $25,000 live foal, Constitution stood for $40,000 for the 2020 season, and there's no question that demand for the stallion will rise following his current-year successes.

When Twin Creeks partnered with WinStar to race Constitution, then send the horse to stud, the Twin Creeks organization also acquired mares to help support their interest in the horse. Gullatt said that Twin Creeks retains nine shares in Constitution and that the operation bought the Belmont Stakes winner's dam, Tizfiz (Tiznow) because “she was value and was an outcross to all our stallions,” Gullatt noted. “Physically, she was a stocky mare about 15.3, which is where Tiz the Law got his size, I'd guess. She looked like a Tiznow sprinter but was a Grade 2 winner who could go long. Just the sweetest, classiest mare to be around.”

Purchased in 2014 for $125,000 at the Keeneland November sale in foal to Horse of the Year Mineshaft (A.P. Indy), Tizfiz produced the Belmont winner as her second foal (fifth overall) for Twin Creeks. Since then, she has a 2-year-old filly named Angel Oak and a yearling colt by the Twin Creeks sire Mission Impazible (Unbridled's Song). Tizfiz is in foal to Constitution for 2021.

On the racetrack, Tizfiz won the G2 San Gorgonio Handicap and three other stakes, and she placed third in the G2 Buena Vista Handicap. The 16-year-old mare is a full sister to Fury Kapcori, winner of the G3 Precisionist Stakes and second in the G1 Hollywood Futurity. Their dam is by Kentucky Derby winner Go for Gin (Pleasant Tap) and is out of a stakes-placed half-sister to Horse of the Year Favorite Trick (Phone Trick).

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English King “Interesting” In Derby: Dettori

Frankie Dettori, who on Monday picked up the mount on favourite English King (Fr) (Camelot {GB}) in the July 4 G1 Investec Derby, told Sky Sports Racing on Tuesday that he will get acquainted with Bjorn Nielsen’s Listed Derby Trial S. winner this week.

“I’m going to go and ride him this week,” Dettori said. “I can only go on what I’ve seen, but he was impressive at Newcastle last year, and very impressive at Lingfield.

“He’s interesting. On the plus side, he went round Lingfield like it was a flat track. You would think Epsom is quite similar, so that is a big tick in the box. I’ve had some good success for Bjorn Nielsen with Stradivarius. He approached me when he realised John [Gosden] didn’t have anything for the Derby. He had a quiet word in my ear to see if I would accept the ride, and I said I was all over it. He looks a good horse from what I’ve seen, so it would be my pleasure.

Dettori replaces Tom Marquand aboard the Ed Walker-trained 3-year-old, with the 22-year-old Marquand having ridden him in his maiden-breaking win in November and at Lingfield.

“It [losing big rides] happened a lot to me when I was young,” Dettori reflected. “Tom is 22–I’m sure he’ll have plenty of other chances in his career, but I was just delighted to get the ride.”

Dettori said he thinks the G1 2000 Guineas winner Kameko (Kitten’s Joy) is his biggest threat in the blue riband.

“Classic form is always the strongest, and Kameko hit the line strong,” he said. “He’s the one who brings class to the party, and the one I fear the most.”

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Study: Did Thoroughbreds Really Descend From Arabians?

One of the hard and fast rules of the Thoroughbred breed is that a registered horse must have descended from one of three foundation sires: The Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian, or the Byerley Turk. A study in the journal Scientific Reports suggests those stallions might not have been Arabians at all.

The study, led by Ben Shykind of Prevail Therapeutics and Elissa J. Cosgrove and Raheleh Sadeghi of Cornell University examined the genetic makeup of 378 Arabian horses from 12 different countries to see how Arabians related to other horse breeds and found “no significant genomic contribution of the Arabian breed to the Thoroughbred racehorse, including Y chromosome ancestry.”

However, the study did find “strong evidence” of Thoroughbred blood in recent generations for Arabians used in flat racing.

The three foundation stallions that are the basis of the modern Thoroughbred were imported to England from the Middle East in the early decades of the 1700s. However, analysis of Y chromosome haplotypes (genes inherited from a single parent) for the Darley Arabian found his lineage actually traces back to the extinct Turkoman horse, an ancient breed from the Middle East and Central Asia under the same grouping of “Oriental Horse” breeds as Arabians, but a different offshoot.

The study does not doubt the existence of Thomas Darley's stallion purchased from the Middle East who went on to shape the modern Thoroughbred, but it does suggest that “its breed was likely of yet unknown genetic origin,” and that the horse's nomenclature carried on the idea that the horse was indeed an Arabian, thus his descendants sprung from that breed. Doubts about the true genetic origin of the Thoroughbred breed, it is noted in the study, were brought up two decades ago in Alexander Mackay-Smith's book “Speed and the Thoroughbred: The Complete History.”

In plotting the 378 horses included in the study by their use – including endurance racing, flat racing, and showing – the 34 Arabians used for flat racing shared the most genetic makeup with Thoroughbreds, while those bred for show purposes traced back to the Egyptian branch of the Arabian breed, and endurance runners tracked with the Polish wing. The researchers found genomic segments in racing Arabians tracing back to Thoroughbreds ranging from two percent up to 62 percent, with some near-full length chromosomes coming from Thoroughbreds.

Five of the 10 male Arabian racehorses traced directly back to the Byerley Turk though their Y chomosomes. Another three shared Whalebone, a significant Thoroughbred sire in the early 1800s, as a common ancestor.

“The presence of Thoroughbred-specific Y chromosome haplogroups among Arabian racehorses indicates that the large chromosomal blocks of Thoroughbred origin detected in flat racing Arabian horses are likely derived, at least in part, from crosses with Thoroughbred stallions that occurred after the emergence of the “Whalebone” haplotype in the 1800s,” the study reads.

Read more about the study, Genome Diversity and the Origin of the Arabian Horse, here.

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Diversity in Racing: Jason Wilson

As many people in the United States and around the world question their personal views on diversity and racial inclusion, we decided to look inwardly on our industry, and we found it wanting. So we asked a tough question to several industry members- How do we make racing at its highest level more diverse?

JASON WILSON, President and COO of Equibase

I am keenly aware that I am the only African-American in the executive ranks of horse racing. I used to joke that Equibase’s advertising meeting was the most diverse meeting in racing (only one of seven members is a white male). Sadly, any meeting I am in is probably the most diverse meeting in horse racing.

There is more to say on this topic than can be printed in one issue of the TDN. Diversity encompasses a broad range of activities. It includes hiring, employee development, corporate culture, and those with whom we do business (fans, owners, and vendors). I will focus my comments on hiring.

The starting point should be to ask why we want to encourage diversity. There are a whole host of reasons, but I will mention the one that should appeal to everyone: Diverse companies are more profitable. McKinsey & Company has studied the performance of diverse companies three times over the past five years, and each time reinforced the hypothesis that diverse companies greatly outperform non-diverse companies, and the greater the representation, the higher the likelihood of outperformance. Moreover, in each of the three studies, the likelihood of outperformance continues to be higher for diversity in ethnicity than in gender. The diversity winners are adopting systematic, business-led approaches to diversity and inclusion, and the results are 36% greater profitability for those that are ethnically diverse and 25% for those that are gender diverse. (Full results of the study here).

Companies need to have a commitment to diversity and meaningful accountability. Early in my career, I was in-house counsel at a growing tech company in Silicon Valley. I raised my hand to chair a diversity task force to increase diversity at the company. After several months of work, the consultant that we hired to help us sat me down and said, “Listen, everybody here means well, but I do not sense that there is an organizational commitment to diversity. Until this becomes the fabric of key performance indicators, performance reviews, and compensation structures, very little will change.” So it requires more than good intentions. It requires the same rigor that we bring to the rest of our business.

Next, we need to look at our hiring practices. I have often heard that we need to hire somebody with racing or horse experience for any given role. That reduces the available talent pool and is a built-in impediment to any diversity. I can point to a handful of people who I work with that came to the sport without any industry experience and have flourished. Rather than recruit primarily from our networks, look to establish alternative pipelines for talent: create scholarships and recruit at historically black colleges and universities and establish internships to give a range of younger people exposure to racing. Equibase and other companies affiliated with The Jockey Club are looking at these strategies.

Honest conversations about diversity are uncomfortable. An incredibly talented and successful college classmate of mine, Mellody Hobson, gave a TED talk on this topic. I encourage anyone interested in the future of the sport to watch it. I also encourage anyone who is interested in speaking about this topic to reach out to me at jwilson@equibase.com.

Do you have an idea that you would be willing to share for this series? Email the TDN’s Katie Ritz at katieritz@tdn.com.

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