Winner of the Grade 3 Dowager Stakes at Keeneland and a pair of other stakes this year, the 5-year-old Summer in Saratoga (by Hard Spun) is one of 86 stakes winners for her sire and is the eighth stakes winner of 10 mares going back in her direct female line going back to ninth dam Misty Isle (Sickle).
The dam of Summer in Saratoga is the Arch mare Love Theway Youare, winner of the G1 Vanity and second in the G1 Santa Margarita, and her dam is the stakes winner Diversa (Tabasco Cat). The line traces back to Ole Liz as the sixth dam.
Racing only at two, Ole Liz won six of her 12 starts, including the Bewitch at Keeneland, the Debutante at Churchill Downs, and the Lassie Trial at Arlington. In addition, Ole Liz ran second in the Arlington-Washington Lassie.
Ole Liz was bred by Joseph V. Tigani, who had purchased a colt named Double Jay (Balladier) and raced him with considerable success, having won six of 10 starts at 2 and being ranked as co-champion colt. Double Jay was never ranked quite so highly in subsequent seasons, but the colt was tough and brave and fast.
When Double Jay's trainer publicly bet other trainers at Churchill Downs that his colt would outrun the highly rated Education (Ariel) at every pole, one of the witnesses was A.B. “Bull” Hancock. He went to the races again the next day to watch Double Jay and Education in the Kentucky Jockey Club Stakes, and Double Jay outran his competition at every pole and won the race. Hancock decided he needed to stand a horse like that.
So, when Tigani decided to send Double Jay to stud, Hancock wanted him for Claiborne, but the owner had raced the horse until he was six. That had rubbed off the luster of Double Jay's juvenile accomplishments, but Hancock managed to persuade Tigani to stand the horse without trying to syndicate him. When Double Jay hit immediately with juvenile champion Doubledogdare, the sire's fee went up to $5,000, and Tigani began having a really fine time as a breeder and owner.
As part of supporting his stallion, Tigani acquired stakes winner Islay Mist (Roman), who produced Ole Liz as her seventh foal in 1963. Once her racing career was over, Ole Liz put the ball out of the park with her first foal, Kittiwake (Sea-Bird), an eight-time stakes winner of very high class. Ole Liz then changed hands a couple of times before being acquired by John Gaines and Bunker Hunt, who bred successive stakes winners from the mare: Oilfield (Hail to Reason), winner of the G3 Knickerbocker and Brighton Beach Handicaps, and Beaconaire (Vaguely Noble), winner of a pair of listed stakes in France.
Both of those sold as yearlings through the Keeneland July yearling sale, the premier venue for select prospects at the time. Oilfield sold for $97,000, and the following year Beaconaire went rather higher, selling for $180,000.
In July 1981, Peggy Augustus attended to the sale with her mother, and “we bought Beaconaire for Jack Knight,” who married Augustus's mother. “He couldn't get to the sales,” Augustus continued, “so he told Mother to bid to a certain amount, and when she got to that point, said 'Oh, to hell with it. If he doesn't want her, I'll take her.' Then he ended up giving Beaconaire to my mother after the mare retired.”
In between, however, there was more to the story.
The following year, Augustus was in France to look at the young horses in training with John Fellows, and when a particularly unpromising youngster galloped past, she asked Fellows, “Tell me that isn't Beaconaire?” It was.
“Beaconaire had a terrible case of the slows,” Augustus said, “but she speeded up enough to win a couple stakes over in France.”
By the time the Vaguely Noble filly was three, she won the Prix du Nabob, and the following year, Beaconaire won the Prix des Tourelles.
Brought back to the States and bred to leading sire Lyphard (Northern Dancer), Beaconaire produced Sabin as her first foal. A chestnut of great elegance, Sabin went to the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga select yearling sale, where trainer Woody Stephens told Augustus that “she was so crooked that he didn't know how she'd stand training, but then she won a million dollars” and a dozen graded stakes for owner Henryk de Kwiatkowski, who had purchased the filly for $750,000 from Keswick Stables and Fourth Estate Stables.
Sabin was the top-selling yearling by Lyphard in 1981.
For de Kwiatkowski's Calumet Farm, Sabin produced a pair of stakes winners, as well as the winning Andora (Conquistador Cielo), and there are three dozen stakes horses so far from Andora's branch of the family alone.
With racemares like Summer in Saratoga, there inevitably will be more.
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