From the evidence of the sums paid for stallion syndications and for price of nomination fees to these unproven sires, a reasonable observer would assume that there is a strong correlation between elite racing performance and its resulting stratospheric stallion valuations and then the progeny results of such horses on the racetrack.
That reasonable observer, however, would be incorrect.
There is a modest correlation between racing excellence and stallion performance; essentially every important stallion is a stakes winner, for instance. But you don't have to look very hard to find Danzig, who was unbeaten in three starts, none a stakes. Clearly, that very talented son of Northern Dancer was an aberration; had he enjoyed a fairly normal racing career, Danzig would have been a stakes winner and probably a stakes winner of very high merit.
Aside from stakes success as a general parameter of racing performance, however, the variability of the genetic material that a stallion provides to his offspring and the equal variability of how that contribution pairs up with a contribution from the dam make breeding effectively an exercise in randomness.
All this makes the prices of major syndications what we might generously call “optimistic.”
This was pointed out by the result of the Grade 2 Bernard Baruch Handicap at Saratoga. The Baruch was won by the New York-bred 4-year-old Somelikeithotbrown (by Big Brown), and the winner is from the first New York-conceived crop by the 2008 Eclipse Award winner as champion 3-year-old colt.
A winner in his only start at two, Big Brown improved massively to remain undefeated through victories in the G1 Florida Derby, Kentucky Derby, and Preakness. Heavily favored to complete the Triple Crown, Big Brown was eased in the Test of the Champion at Belmont Park.
The son of Boundary (Danzig) won his final two starts, a prep for the Haskell and the main event, then was retired to stud at Three Chimneys Farm in Kentucky to stand for a fee of $60,000 live foal. The other top horse retiring to Kentucky for the 2009 season was two-time Horse of the Year Curlin (Smart Strike), and both were scheduled to have stud fees of $100,000 or thereabouts before the Great Recession came crumbling down on everyone's head.
That debacle had the effect of lowering those two horses' stud fees by nearly half, to $60,000 for their first seasons. External factors did not make the economics of standing the two champions any easier, but the long-term challenge for each was to get horses of very high racing class.
Curlin answered in the affirmative, most strongly as his stock gained experience and maturity on the racetrack, and the champion chestnut has established himself as one of the premier stallions in the country with a stud fee of $175,000.
In contrast, however, Big Brown sired winners from large books of accomplished mares, and the regression to the norm seen in the quality of his racers produced a corresponding regression in the horse's stud fee.
To date, Big Brown has had nine crops of racing age, and from 584 foals of racing age (including 27 2-year-olds), he has 27 stakes winners, including seven group or graded stakes winners. The best of these was Dortmund, a smashing chestnut of giant proportions who won the G1 Santa Anita Derby and Los Alamitos Futurity, as well as running third in the 2015 Kentucky Derby behind American Pharoah (Pioneerof the Nile).
This is not an exercise in bashing Big Brown, who followed a good racing career with stud performance that is slightly above average: he sired a Grade 1 winner and a half-dozen other group or graded winners from 27 stakes winners. Few stallions do that much.
Average performance, even a bit better than average success, however, is not nearly enough to keep a stallion in Kentucky at a commercial fee under the present market circumstances. The pressures on stallions include the escalating book sizes that have some of the most in-demand stallions covering more than 200 mares in the Northern Hemisphere breeding season from February through early July; the dual-hemisphere shuttle system which sends some stallions to the Southern Hemisphere, where they will be working with another large book of mares; the demands of the sales market for large, correctly conformed, attractive, and well-matured yearlings or 2-year-olds; and then the racetrack demands to get racing stock that can win early and often, then show high form in graded company.
If a stallion prospect could know what lay in store for him, he'd just have a nervous breakdown and be done with it.
The horses who have the libido and physical health to handle the breeding demands, then to compound that by outperforming expectations with lots of good individuals who regularly perform at the highest levels, are rare creations indeed. That's what a top-class contemporary stallion has to provide, and it's a prescription to understand why there's only one Galileo, one Tapit, or one War Front every few years.
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