Al Stall Jr. | Horse Racing Free Tips

Medaglia d’Oro Filly Off the Mark at First Asking in NOLA

6th-Fair Grounds, $47,000, Msw, 11-27, 2yo, f, 1m 70y, 1:45.79, ft, 3 1/2 lengths.
SOCIAL DILEMMA (f, 2, Medaglia d’Oro–Singing Kitty {MSW & GSP, $398,478}, by Ministers Wild Cat) was let go at debut odds of 21-5, better than twice her morning line of 2-1, and worked out a good trip beneath Colby Hernandez to graduate at first asking going an extended mile Friday afternoon at the Fair Grounds. Four wide around the first turn, the $575,000 Fasig-Tipton Saratoga buyback stalked the pace outside and poked her nose in front with about a half-mile to travel. Going well on the second turn, she cut the corner into the stretch and came away to take it by 3 1/2 lengths. Stillchargingmaria (Pioneerof the Nile-Stopchargingmaria), a $1.9-million weanling purchase at FTKNOV in 2018, chased three deep approaching the stretch and kept on well to be second at overlaid odds. Spendthrift Farm acquired the three-time stakes winner and GSP Singing Kitty with this filly in utero for $750,000 at Keeneland November in 2017 and the California-bred mare has produced colts by Lord Nelson and Mendelssohn the last two years. Singing Kitty was most recently bred to Into Mischief. Sales history: $575,000 RNA Ylg ’19 FTSAUG. Lifetime Record: 1-1-0-0, $28,200. Click for the Equibase.com chart or VIDEO, sponsored by Fasig-Tipton.
O/B-Spendthrift Farm LLC (KY); T-Albert M Stall Jr.

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Tom’s D’Etat And The Stud Deal That Could Have Changed Everything

Tom's d'Etat was one of three horses that stepped off the van at the WinStar Farm stallion complex on Sunday morning, less than 24 hours after each ran in the Breeders' Cup Classic at Keeneland just a few miles away.

For his two fellow passengers, a future at WinStar Farm was practically guaranteed as soon as they jumped through the proper hoops to warrant a stud career. Improbable and Global Campaign, second and third respectively in the Classic, both had run under the WinStar colors, so standing at the farm was the next logical step. For Tom's d'Etat, a future at WinStar marks an incredible reversal of fortune from one that could have seen him begin his stud career in relative obscurity.

Looking back at his full body of work, a major Kentucky farm seems like a logical destination for Tom's d'Etat. An earner of more than $1.7 million, he established himself as one of the top runners of the older male division in 2020, and he carried over the momentum from a win in the Grade 1 Clark Stakes last year. Being what will likely be the final top-level son by his late sire Smart Strike to enter stud certainly doesn't hurt, either, joining the likes of Curlin, English Channel, Lookin At Lucky, and Dominus among Kentucky's stallion ranks.

In the summer of 2017, Tom's d'Etat was none of those things, besides a son of Smart Strike. He was a dependable 4-year-old allowance-level runner for the Benson family's G M B Racing and trainer Al Stall, Jr., but after missing his juvenile season due to injury and needing a few tries to break his maiden in the fall of his 3-year-old campaign, a future as a serious Kentucky stallion prospect seemed like a pipe dream.

Tom's d'Etat was trending in the right direction during that year's Saratoga meet, and he was being pointed toward the G1 Woodward Stakes after winning an optional claiming race by nine lengths.

That optional claimer would be the final race of Tom's d'Etat's 2017 campaign. An emerging cannon bone fracture derailed a planned graded stakes debut in the G1 Woodward Stakes, and he went dormant for 15 months after having two screws put in his right front leg.

When his future as an on-track competitor was still murky, Stall and his team wanted to make sure their well-blooded loyal soldier had a future lined up for him after the races.

“There was a time when I was going to give him to the starter at Churchill and Keeneland, Scott Jordan, who has a farm in Indiana [Breakway Farm in Dillsboro, Ind.] – give him to him – and he said, 'I'll hustle up some mares. We don't have any Smart Strike blood in Indiana,'” Stall said. “Then, for whatever reason, everything started staying together on him, and he finally got to prove the kind of talent we always thought he was.”

He'd have been a solid addition to the Breakway Farm roster, but far from its most proven member on the racetrack. In 2020, Grade 1 winners Calculator and Turbo Compressor, Grade 3 winner Charming Kitten, and Grade 1-placed Greeley's Conquest resided in their stud barn.

Tara Mathias, manager of Breakway Farm and Jordan's daughter, said the arrangement never got further than conversations as a contingency plan if Tom's d'Etat couldn't make it back from his injury, and ink was never put to paper over it. There were no hard feelings when the horse went on to achieve what he did and move higher up ladder as a stallion prospect, though having a horse with Grade 1 talent in him slip away from the farm's grasp was a downer.

“Al's exercise rider at the time said he was a really nice horse, and was probably going to retire, and he'd be a good fit in Indiana,” Mathias said, “Then, he just kept winning and winning, and got better and better. They just didn't know how he was going to come back from it, and he didn't have enough under his belt to make him a huge hit in Kentucky. He'd be big in our small pond.”

Normally, a layoff of that duration is enough to retire an older horse, but Tom's d'Etat rewarded the patience of his connections by retaining his up-and-coming form when he returned. Horse racing is a sport full of diverging paths, and the decision to keep Tom's d'Etat in training ultimately created a seven-figure swing in on-track earnings, with the added ripple effects tied to all the graded black type that would have gone to someone else, the money spent and earned in a major Kentucky stud deal, and all the mares he will see in 2021 and beyond.

Tom's d'Etat raced twice at five, culminating in his first stakes triumph in the Tenacious Stakes at the Fair Grounds. He was overmatched in his first try against graded stakes competition in the G1 Pegasus World Cup Invitational Stakes, but he came back after a spring freshening to finish second in the G2 Alysheba Stakes and third in the G2 Stephen Foster Stakes.

From that point on, Tom's d'Etat was in the mix against the best in his division – often as the oldest horse in the field. He finished his 6-year-old campaign with victories in the G2 Fayette Stakes and G1 Clark Stakes, then he racked up wins this year in the Oaklawn Mile Stakes and G2 Stephen Foster Stakes this year at age seven.

In July, following his 4 1/4-length Stephen Foster victory, WinStar Farm revealed it had secured Tom's d'Etat's breeding rights when he retired to stud. From a horse that was perhaps one relapsed injury away from going to stud as a giveaway, Tom's d'Etat had become a blue-chip prospect recruited by one of Kentucky's top stallion operations.

Tom's d'Etat came up empty in his swan song, finishing out of the money in the Breeders' Cup Classic, but Stall said there was never a doubt that he belonged in the race, and amongst the best in his division.

“I'm very, very biased, but I thought he was the best looking horse in the field in the Classic,” he said. “He was moving really well. I just think those two races this summer back-to-back, the Foster and the Whitney, maybe were just enough for him at this age. That would just be my guess, because he was giving us every indication he was going fine, but he's a smart old boy, and maybe that was one of the contributing factors.”

So now, three years after his future looked to be in Indiana, Tom's d'Etat could realistically fit nearly half the Hoosier State's broodmare population into his projected debut book at stud. He'll stand for $17,500 in his debut season, and in addition to his graded-level success, WinStar Farm's Elliott Walden was quick to note that he's got a stallion's family under him.

“Being by Smart Strike, from the family of Candy Ride, that's two proven stallions,” Walden said. “He moves with a very lengthy stride, full of quality. He has the length of a Candy Ride, Smart Strike kind of look to him; similar to Lookin At Lucky, just a long, two-turn type horse.”

Plenty of words have been written at this point about the “win now” mentality of the commercial stallion market, and a prospect that didn't race at two and didn't win until the fall of his 3-year-old season might give some pause about what kind of precociousness Tom's d'Etat may or may not pass on to his foals.

Stall said the horse's slow start was more about bad luck and bad timing than him not being ready for the races.

“He would have have probably broken his maiden in his second start during the Keeneland fall meet, like Blame did as a 2-year-old,” Stall said, projecting his talent had he stayed healthy. “I just breezed him one day at Churchill Downs, and everything was fine with him, then something just flaked off and cost us a year. It wasn't like he was some big horse that didn't know what he was doing. A few things just started adding up. It wouldn't surprise me if he got a typier, smaller horse that would be a decent fall 2-year-old. That's the fun of it. It takes a bit of patience, but that's okay.”

Sunday's transition from the racetrack to the stud barn was a familiar one for Stall, who sent Blame on a van from Churchill Downs to Claiborne Farm ten years earlier after the colt shocked the world to best Zenyatta and win the Breeders' Cup Classic.

In the time between, Stall said he has been fascinated seeing what types of mares worked and didn't work when matched with Blame. Now, he's got another stallion to watch and theorize on matings, and based on the page under Tom's d'Etat and the multi-surface success of Smart Strike, he has at least one outside-the-box idea before the breeding season begins.

“Theoretically, there should be some grass there, even though we tried him on grass, and he did literally everything but stop and graze the day we ran him on it,” he said. “Blame's a good grass sire and he never set foot on the grass.”

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This Side Up: A Coup d’Etat to Benefit Us All

In these days of wilful division and reluctant separation, perhaps the wider world could for once learn something from our own community. For while our preoccupations may be frivolous, relative to such momentous challenges as the securing of democracy or public health, they do at least inculcate precisely the kind of calm forbearance most needed, right now, to quell the hysteria and despair infecting national wellbeing.

It’s pouring with rain? Go feed your horse and clean out the stall. Middle of a heatwave? Go feed your horse and clean out the stall. The trough has frozen to the depth of your fist? Go feed your horse and clean out the stall. You have no choice; and you have no guarantees. How often does it happen that your reward, for all your dependability and patience and exertion, is a split-second that instantly unravels daily increments of endeavor amounting to months, seasons, years? Yet still we persevere, ever animated by faith in what we are doing; faith in our horses. Or, if not faith, at least hope. And it just feels like a lot of people out there could do with a little more of that.

Even the Breeders’ Cup, the game-changing innovation of the modern industry, is now into its 37th cycle. And if the differences in the experience this year could scarcely be less welcome, the host city and its racetrack have banked enough Turf history to absorb even the bleakest addition to precedent. If the stands loom emptily over the stretch, they still teem with the glad spectres of horsemen and women past–whose lore, whose length of perspective, has seeped into the Bluegrass generation by generation, as gradual as the dew laid through cold hours of darkness to offer a sparkling welcome to a new day.

Because we know that dawn will come. It will bring fresh challenges, no doubt, as well as fresh hope. But the sun will rise in the same place, to the same clatter of buckets, the same impatient nickering.

That’s why there could be no more fitting winner of the American sport’s richest prize than Tom’s d’Etat (Smart Strike). Especially if he could be preceded to the winner’s enclosure by Starship Jubilee (Indy Wind), or Whitmore (Pleasantly Perfect), or another from a handful of runners foaled in 2013. For these are living monuments to the shared resilience of the Thoroughbred and its custodians; and, whatever happens here, the light they have collectively shed on this gloomiest of years has already shown us how to keep the faith.

It is five years and one day since Whitmore won by seven lengths on debut at Churchill. Before discovering his true vocation as a sprinter, he proceeded to finish last in the GI Kentucky Derby. And some of those ahead of him, from winner Nyquist (Uncle Mo) to seventh Brody’s Cause (Giant’s Causeway) and 14th Outwork (Uncle Mo), were represented on Friday’s juvenile program by first foals.

Whitmore at Keeneland | Coady

That’s not an option available to Whitmore, whose castration means that Ron Moquett, having maintained his enthusiasm with such skill, may yet eke out a fifth start in the GI B.C. Sprint at Del Mar next year. Tom’s d’Etat, however, will very soon discover just what he has been missing when he retires to WinStar–a farm with a remarkable stake in the GI Longines BC Classic.

Losing Pioneerof the Nile just as he was entering his pomp was all the more unfortunate given the ageing profile, at that point, of its other elite stallions. But WinStar is regenerating with purpose and, even while joining other farms in a series of pragmatic cuts for 2021, has been able to more than double Constitution’s fee to $85,000. If his son Tiz the Law happens to win the Classic, then the guys at WinStar may be almost as pleased as Coolmore, who will someday be welcoming him to Ashford.

WinStar is further represented, moreover, by Improbable (City Zip) and Global Campaign (Curlin). Given the sad news this week about Sagamore Farm, his co-owners, it would be especially poignant if Global Campaign were to outrun his odds as I expect.

My pick, however, remains Tom’s d’Etat–and not merely on grounds of sentiment. After stumbling out of the gate in the GI Whitney S., he was stuck behind petrified fractions (:25.12 and :49.74) and did well even to close for third to Improbable. Feeding off splits of :22.90 and :46.09 at Oaklawn in the spring, however, he had cut down the same rival decisively. That performance showed how well this horse operates off a break, and he has been duly freshened by a trainer who has been working back from this assignment all year. It was in a Grade II round here last fall, moreover, that Tom’s d’Etat announced his belated coming of age: the only Keeneland stakes success in this field.

The one pity is that Al Stall, Jr., having been ungraciously cast as the villain when Blame (Arch) spoiled the immaculate record of Zenyatta (Street Cry {Ire}), would find himself saluted with even less acclaim this time round. Whatever happens, he deserves immense credit for so patiently bringing Tom’s d’Etat to his full potential after just seven races across his first four years in training.

Global Campaign | Horsephotos

In fairness, the horse has become very sound with maturity and–from the final crop of a sire of sires, and with his second dam a sister to none other than Candy Ride (Arg)–looks an extremely attractive stud prospect. At WinStar, after all, he will be joining another stallion who has bucked the general trend by advancing his fee to $90,000 from $70,000. And Speightstown, who didn’t retire until he was six, is now rising 23.

So patience, once again: our perennial watchword. Seven starts across four seasons will have encompassed an awful lot of mornings–rainy, sunny, foggy, snowy–when his manger has been filled, his bedding changed, with no gallop. And that’s before we wind back to his pre-training, with Frank and Daphne Wooten; his preparation for the sales, just down the road from Keeneland at Hunter Valley Farm; never mind to the original drawing board of breeders SF Bloodstock.

Unlike Whitmore, Tom’s d’Etat won’t be racing into a third presidential term. But all these venerable animals reprove us that even the Classic racehorse is only an adolescent. A few years ago, researchers studied 274 American Thoroughbreds and established their average peak at 4.45 years.

Some benighted farms, no doubt, would be nervous of starting a stallion at eight. But since they tend to give up on most sires by the time they reach that age anyway, it’s hard to see the rush. Far better, surely, to give them a chance to demonstrate the kind of genetic attributes we should want to replicate in the breed.

So patience, everybody. Go feed your horse. And keep hoping.

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Stall: The 3-Year-Olds Are The X Factor In This Year’s Classic

The Breeders' Cup will be one of the few major events in American racing taking place at its normal place in the calendar this year, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. But Tom's d'Etat trainer Al Stall Jr., said that we shouldn't forget that the schedule disruptions from earlier this year could still have an impact on the Classic.

“I don't think anyone's ever gone into the Classic and said it's a soft field,” Stall said. “There are a lot of superlatives talking about these horses and I agree. I think the X factor is the 3-year-olds. Because of the way the Triple Crown laid out these year, they've had a nice progression into the race. There are two 3-year-olds that really got my attention — obviously, Tiz the Law and Authentic — and that's a little bit different than in years past. Sometimes you'll get a 3-year-old who's a little bit down and out. Obviously Pharoah was the exception to that.

“It's all about the trip and the luck from here on out.”

Stall does not expect any one horse will be allowed to take an uncontested easy lead, and much of the race will come down to strategy. He's hopeful Tom's d'Etat can sit off the early going, but it will come down to how the traffic plays out.

Perhaps surprisingly, Stall said there's no one horse in this field that intimidates him more than any other, or even a handful. Stall said there are eight contenders (though he did not name them) he thinks could pull off a win.

If he were to win the Classic, Tom's d'Etat will have done it off one of the longest layoffs since Invasor (ARG) in 2006. Stall said the break from the Aug. 1 Grade 1 Whitney to the Classic was a combination of design and circumstance. He considered sending the horse to the G1 Jockey Club Gold Cup but when the stakes schedule was released, he realized that gave him 28 days to get the horse from one effort to the next. Stall's gut told him to bring the 7-year-old in fresh. He let the horse relax for a little while, the began ramping up his breezes in mid-September and sent him out for an easy four-furlong work Oct. 31, which reminded him of the final work from Blame in 2010.

“He just went out there by himself and was looking around and stretching his legs,” said Stall. “He seems to have benefitted from that because he has seemed very, very comfortable all week.”

Much of the media attention (and likely, eventually, wagering) will be on Tiz the Law and the Baffert trio. It isn't the first time Stall has come into the Classic hoping to steal the spotlight. Zenyatta's loss to Blame was a heartbreaker for many in racing, but Stall has happy memories of that strange, quiet night at Churchill Downs.

“I just remember afterwards it was a perfectly clear, crisp, Kentucky fall evening and the sky was coral and the black was coming in. We were so happy for all the connections, everybody involved, the horse himself,” Stall remembered. “Our little pocket celebrated quite loudly while the rest of the grandstand was silent but we didn't notice that.”

Stall confirmed Tom's d'Etat will be retired after Saturday's races. Earlier this year, it was announced he will take up stud duties at WinStar farm.

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