Tag: Bloodlines

What difference a year makes! Or not.

The Gun Runner Express keeps blazing along, and here at the tag end of 2022, the champion son of Candy Ride is the leading second-crop sire by a massive margin over his contemporaries: $14 million to $7 million , nearly double the earnings of the next-closest pair of Practical Joke (by Into Mischief) and Arrogate (Unbridled's Song).

But Gun Runner is in a sphere of his own, and some of his competitors seem to be doing quite well on their own behalf.

Interestingly, the top six first-crop leaders at the end of 2021 (Gun Runner, Three Chimneys; Practical Joke, Ashford; Connect (Curlin) Lane's End; Classic Empire (Pioneerof the Nile) Ashford; Cupid (Tapit) Ashford; and Gormley (Malibu Moon) Spendthrift) are in the same position relative to one another a year later, but into this group a little change has come in the form of Arrogate and Keen Ice (Curlin) Calumet, whose 3-year-olds and second-crop juveniles really pushed them into competition. For instance, Keen Ice would still be in this Elite Eight, even if we subtracted the earnings of 2022 Kentucky Derby winner Rich Strike ($2.4 million).

Not bad, comrade.

Likewise, Practical Joke has put in a sterling second season with his racers and is well on his way to being the “next Scat Daddy” among sires shuttling to South America. Practical Joke's initial crop of racers in the Southern Hemisphere are now three, but from the sire's first crop in Chile, he has sired four Group 1 winners, so far.

Ashford Stud's Adrian Mansergh-Wallace noted that “it's very interesting to see what has happened to Practical Joke down in South America. It is very encouraging. It's an indicator that something serious is happening, much like we saw it with Scat Daddy. From his first crop in Chile, just turned three, Practical Joke has equaled Scat Daddy's record of four G1 winners in his first crop, is consistently getting group horses, and it makes you want to pinch yourself that this could be something out of the ordinary. There are big crops coming behind these also.”

For quantity, Practical Joke is the leading sire among this cadre of stallions with their second set of juveniles racing. The son of Into Mischief has the most foals (252), the most runners (176) and winners (89). Gun Runner, on the other hand, leads by the measures of quality, with the most stakes winners (12) and stakes performers (27), as well as the most graded stakes winners (9).

The only glitch for Practical Joke was that he went until October of this year before getting his first G1 winner here in the States. Then, Chocolate Gelato won the G1 Frizette Stakes, the sire has logged the four G1 winners in Chile, and on Dec. 17, Practical Move won the G2 Los Alamitos Futurity, defeating a highly lauded trio of racers trained by Bob Baffert including second-place finisher Carmel Road (Quality Road) and third-place Fort Bragg (Tapit). Practical Move is trained by Tim Yakteen.

Bred in Kentucky by Chad Brown and Head of Plains Partners, Practical Move is out of the stakes-placed Ack Naughty (Afleet Alex) and is the dam's first stakes winner. Ack Naughty is one of three black-type racers from the stakes-placed Dash for Money (General Meeting); the two others won stakes: So Lonesome (Awesome Again), winner of a pair of New York-bred restricted stakes, and No Spin (Johannesburg), a talented athlete who had a huge stride at the 2011 Keeneland April sale of juveniles in training and won open black-type events such as the Royal Glint Stakes at Hawthorne.

As a yearling, Practical Move was marked an RNA for $90,000 at the 2021 Keeneland September yearling sale and then reappeared earlier this year at the OBS April sale of 2-year-olds in training. Working a furlong in :10 1/5, with a stride length of 25.5 feet and a massive BreezeFig of 77 from the consignment of Eisaman Equine, Practical Move sold for $230,000 to Pierre Jean Amestoy Jr., Leslie A. Amestoy, and Roger K. Beasley. The colt has won two of his five starts, with a second and two thirds, for earnings of $194,200. Ack Naughty produced a colt by Complexity (Maclean's Music) in 2022 and was bred back to Upstart (Flatter).

The post Bloodlines Presented By Mishriff: Practical Joke And The Elite Eight appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

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One inquiring mind asked, “Why do we have gray Thoroughbreds, and where do they come from?” Who can resist such a question?

The first part is fairly easy. Gray Thoroughbreds are part of the breed because they have been here from the beginning, and the coat color is with us today because a gray parent will give its graying color factor to approximately half of his offspring, and those gray offspring will pass it on through time.

Surprisingly enough, at least to me, is the fact that gray nearly died out. Went very quiet, both here and overseas. Through much of the 19th century, it was not common to see a gray, nor especially a top-quality horse of that color.

Today, much of the color comes from multiple leading sire Tapit, as well as from Unbridled's Song. The latter gets his gray from his broodmare sire Caro, and more on that in a minute. Tapit's gray comes through his fourth dam and three subsequent gray mares, but fourth dam Foggy Note (by The Axe) presents us with the first part of a significant question.

The problem with Foggy Note is that both her parents are gray!

Since we can't know specifically which graying factor came forward to Tapit, The Axe (by the gray English Derby winner Mahmoud) and Silver Song (by the bay Royal Note) present the first quandary in tracing the gray lineage that we see from Tapit today. Or so it appears.

The gray factor through The Axe and Mahmoud comes from the latter's dam, Mah Mahal, a daughter of Gainsborough and the great gray racer Mumtaz Mahal. An even better race filly than anything she produced, Mumtaz Mahal was quite a good broodmare and a great producer of producers. Her daughters are responsible not only for leading sire Mahmoud but also Nasrullah, and Mumtaz Mahal is the third dam of leading sire Royal Charger, as well as Arc de Triomphe winner Migoli (Bois Roussel), who is the sire of Belmont Stakes winner Gallant Man.

Mumtaz Mahal got the gray from her sire The Tetrarch (Roi Herode).

Where then does the gray come from on the other side of Foggy Note's pedigree? It goes back through a line of gray mares to Tapit's ninth dam Silver Beauty, who is a daughter of the gray Stefan the Great, a son of The Tetrarch who won the Middle Park Stakes at two in 1918 and was imported to the States. All nine of the gray dams leading to Tapit are bred in the States and represent the longest sequence of same-sex graying that I have encountered.

So, although Foggy Note presents us with a problem of her two gray parents, we can resolve it because both graying factors came from the same stallion The Tetrarch.

In the case of Unbridled's Song, whose gray comes through his broodmare sire Caro, the gray factor goes back another seven generations to its source, The Tetrarch.

The unbeaten gray son of Roi Herode is thus the source of nearly all the gray in the breed.

The Tetrarch's sire was bred in France by Maurice Caillaut and was a high-class racehorse whose best form came as a front-running stayer, but in the best races, there was always one who could catch him in the stretch, and Roi Herode was second in his most important French races, the Prix du President de la Republique and Prix Royal Oak, as well as in the Doncaster Cup. The horse was purchased by Edward Kennedy for 2,000 pounds after finishing second at Doncaster but bowed a tendon the following season when in training and went to stud at Kennedy's Straffan Stud in County Kildare, where he sired The Tetrarch in his first crop.

Roi Herode's sire Le Samaritain and grandsire Le Sancy were both bred in France by Arthur de Schickler, who raced them successfully. Le Samaritain was a good racehorse, but Le Sancy was somewhat better, both on the racecourse and at stud. An immensely tough racehorse, Le Sancy won 27 of his 43 starts, had speed, and stayed well.

Good as he was on the racecourse, Le Sancy became a sire out of all proportion to his racing class, siring top juveniles like Le Sagittaire (Prix Morny, Grand Criterium), 3-year-olds who won classics at 3 like Ex Voto (Prix du Jockey Club), and others that trained on to excel as older horses like Le Justicier (Eclipse Stakes). The best of Le Sancy's many good horses was Semendria, a gray filly who won the 1900 Poule d'Essai des Pouliches, Prix Vermeille, and Grand Prix de Paris, when the latter was the most important all-age contest in Europe.

Le Sancy and his successors at stud also breathed life back into the floundering male line of the Byerley Turk through Herod, and Kennedy, who was a fancier of this male line, was partly attracted to Roi Herode because his name is the French for King Herod.

From Le Sancy, the graying factor goes back through his dam Gem of Gems, through her sire Strathconan, his dam Souvenir, and then to Chanticleer. An appropriately named son of Birdcatcher, Chanticleer got his gray coat from his dam Whim, and the gray factor then goes through her sire Drone and grandsire Master Robert to the latter's dam Spinster, a foal of 1803.

Spinster begins a series of seven gray mares, the second-longest same-sex series in the line, to a daughter of the gray stallion Crab (Alcock Arabian). But, as might happen, there is a second puzzle in this line of grays. Spinster's second dam is Bab, and both her parents are gray.

Bab's sire is the gray horse Bourdeaux (Herod 1758), and her dam is the gray mare Speranza (Eclipse 1764). Yes, that Herod and that Eclipse, neither of whom was a gray. But the mares they were bred to were grays and passed on the coat color to the next generation.

In the fifth generation of Bab's pedigree, Crab is the sire of her fourth dam, a gray mare of 1750. In the top half of Bab's pedigree, Crab occupies the same generation but is the broodmare sire of the broodmare sire of Bourdeaux. So it appears that all grays lead back to Crab and the Alcock Arabian.

But this is a relatively old piece of Thoroughbred pedigree recording, and things are never as simple as we might hope.

Before we quite get back to Crab, Bourdeaux's broodmare sire is Cygnet, a gray son of the Godolphin Arabian (1724-ish), and out of Godolphin Blossom, both of whose parents are gray. Her sire Crab is a known quantity for the gray team, but her dam is a gray Flying Childers mare whose gray factor may have come from the Brownlow Turk, a more mysterious horse born around 1695.

So there is a possibility that the gray coat found in racehorses comes from a horse about whom we know almost nothing, but that's only a 50-50 chance, and after all, it's not the coat that counts, it's what's inside.

The post Bloodlines Presented By Mishriff: Why Do We Have Gray Thoroughbreds? appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

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The historical record on different lines of descent in the Thoroughbred shows that the winnowing out of male lines has gone on from the beginnings of the breed. And the great majority of male lines disappeared in the first 75 to 100 years of the formation of the Thoroughbred. By the late 1700s, there were only three principal male-line ancestors, each coming through only a handful of sires, even at that point.

By the late 1800s, the three main male lines were swelling out of equal proportion to signal that the Darley Arabian through Eclipse was becoming overwhelming in its domination, and that situation has compounded through the 20th century.

In 1957, to take a year, there were 24 stakes winners in the U.S. from stallions of the Herod line. That seems like a decent number until you consider that stakes winners descending from the Godolphin Arabian-line sire Fair Play alone numbered 31 that year.

The 1950s pointed out some interesting things about the two lesser male lines of Byerley Turk/Herod and Godolphin Arabian/Mathem. Most importantly at mid-century, the statistics showed a continuation for Herod through two sources. First was The Tetrarch (by Roi Herode). A foal of 1911, The Tetrarch was the best of Roi Herode's quite numerous good horses. The Tetrarch was notably special among the lot, however, and he was little less amazing at stud. The generously proportioned gray sired racers of exceptional speed, as well as unexpected stamina, including three winners of the St. Leger at Doncaster among his offspring.

There would have been more and greater honors for The Tetrarch if only there had been more foals. Had he possessed even average fertility, The Tetrarch might well have resurrected the Herod line in his own image. Slim fertility, at best, doomed the great gray's opportunities of turning the tide.

The other line of significance for Herod was that descending from Tourbillon. Marcel Boussac's son of the great French racer Ksar sired a mighty brood of athletic racers who possessed speed and durability, plus enough class to vie for the classics and great all-age prizes.

Ten of those 24 stakes winners for Herod in 1957 descended from Tourbillon, including three from the Claiborne stallion Ambiorix and four from the Almahurst Farm sire Nirgal.

For the Godolphin line, 31 of its 32 total 1957 stakes winners came through Fair Play, and 16 of those were through Man o' War. Those numbers sound pretty good, at least at first glance.

Even 65 years ago, however, the writing was on the wall. The two male lines of more scarce representation were represented by too few individuals, and the opportunities to breed to these was too narrowly focused on a handful of superb sires like Tourbillon and Man o' War. Some of their stock has continued in the male line at the highest level through the ensuing decades, resulting in champions like Precisionist (Crozier back to Tourbillon) and Desert Vixen (In Reality back to Man o' War), as well as Tiznow (Cee's Tizzy back to In Reality and Man o' War).

The stats for the Eclipse line, however, tell the tale of inevitability.

In 1957, some 65 years ago, there were 410 stakes winners tracing to Eclipse. Primarily these came through Bend Or (Doncaster), with 165, but the vast spread of them virtually guaranteed that some of these would breed on to become the overwhelming lines of today.

Among the lines of Eclipse operating with high success at the time were the branches of Swynford and his classic-siring sons St Germans (Kentucky Derby winners Twenty Grand and Bold Venture, the latter the sire of Triple Crown winner Assault) and Challenger, the sire of Horse of the Year Challedon and champion Gallorette; of Vedette and his successors, including St. Simon, to such international champions as Ribot; of Bay Ronald and his descendants, especially Hyperion, who had sons as leading sires in North and South America, as well as in Australia; and then there were also the “American” lines of Domino, Ben Brush, and Broomstick, whose point of importation in the male line came back in the 19th century.

All these are Eclipse, and there are more.

The irresistible push from Bend Or's typhoon of genetic success was first seen to great effect in the States through Bend Or's greatest son: Ormonde through Flying Fox to Teddy and his early- to mid-century sons Sir Gallahand III and Bull Dog, as well as grandson Bull Lea; additional importations came through Phalaris, with his sons Sickle (Preakness winner Polynesian and multiple classic winner Native Dancer) and Pharamond (Horse of the Year Tom Fool, classic winner Tim Tam, and Horse of the Year Buckpasser), then Pharos's son Nearco provided the next wave with his sons Nasrullah and Royal Charger.

Now, several of those lines in male descent are no longer with us, or they are very rare at the higher levels of competition, including all the old American lines and such familiar stalwarts of mid-century breeding as Teddy and Hyperion.

The Bend Or line possessed and enlarged upon the volume required for a stallion or a sire line to have a realistic chance to continue, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that horses inevitably encounter, and today their percentage of the male-line representation continues to grow.

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Although there is still quite a bit of purse money to race for in the coming 30-odd days of 2022, the freshman sire list has firmed up considerably. Atop the rankings is the juvenile Grade 1 winner Bolt d'Oro (by Medaglia d'Oro). If the bay colt retains his position, he will become the first son of Medaglia d'Oro to lead a sire list and the first descendant of the Sadler's Wells branch of Northern Dancer to lead a sire list in the States since Kitten's Joy in 2018.

On Nov. 26, Bolt d'Oro's son Instant Coffee became the stallion's fifth stakes victor with a 1 1/4-length success in the Grade 2 Kentucky Jockey Club Stakes. Instant Coffee is his sire's third graded winner, and the sire has nine racers who are stakes-placed.

Unhurried early behind slow fractions, Instant Coffee came strongly through the final three-sixteenths to win as the 1.54-to-1 favorite over Curly Jack (Good Magic), who was the second choice, had won the previous G3 Iroquois Stakes, and is one of five stakes winners by freshman sire and Eclipse champion juvenile Good Magic (Curlin), who is second to Bolt d'Oro on the freshman sire list.

If $100,000 in earnings represents a length, Bolt d'Oro is currently about three-quarters of a length ahead of Good Magic, and Justify (Scat Daddy) is about 1 ¾ lengths back in third. Then, Army Mule (Friesan Fire) is 3 ¼ lengths back in fourth, with a length on Sharp Azteca (Freud) in fifth.

Clearly, this is no 2021, when Gun Runner won the freshman sire contest by a pole, because even now there is significant room for competition among the leading cadre, and less than two lengths covers the next quartet: Mendelssohn (Scat Daddy), Girvin (Tale of Ekati), Oscar Performance (Kitten's Joy), and Mo Town (Uncle Mo).

Other points of importance to consider among the freshmen sires is that numbers matter. Of the 73 stallions with first-year starters, only 10 had more than 100 foals. Five of those fill the top six positions, and all 10 rank among the top 18. Only Army Mule (93) broke through the barrier of the most popular stallions, and he's not far from 100 first-crop foals.

Oscar Performance has the smallest number of foals (72) among the stallions in the top 10, and three in the top set have more than double that number: Mendelssohn (152), Bolt d'Oro (146), and Good Magic (145). In contrast, the stallion with the fewest foals among the top 20 is 12th-place Awesome Slew (Awesome Again), with 36. Yes, some of the stallions have crops exceeding his by more than 100.

Awesome Slew stands at the O'Farrell family's Ocala Stud in Florida, and Girvin also stood there until the exploits of his first crop racers, notably four stakes winners, including G2 Saratoga Special winner Damon's Mound, propelled a transfer to Airdrie Stud in Kentucky.

Two of the stakes winners by Girvin won restricted races in Florida, parts of the Florida Stallion Stakes Series, and the chief winner by Awesome Slew, Awesome Strong, won the In Reality and the Affirmed divisions of the stallion stakes.

Although both of those young sires benefited somewhat from standing in a regional market, that fact also circumscribed their opportunities to a degree because there are not as many mares elsewhere as in Kentucky, nor all of an equal quality.

One such good, young, well-pedigreed mare beginning her producing career is the dam of Instant Coffee.

Bred in Kentucky by Sagamore Farm LLC, Instant Coffee may be the last horse bred by Kevin Plank's Maryland-based operation that was dispersed in 2018. Hunter Rankin, who was president of Sagamore, said that Instant Coffee's dam, the Uncle Mo mare Follow No One, “didn't sell at the Keeneland November sale as a broodmare prospect, and Kevin did a deal with my parents [who own Upson Downs Farm]. That's why Sagamore is listed as the breeder. She and the foal were both at Upson Downs all along.”

Rankin also bought the mare for Sagamore as a 2-year-old in training. He said, “Gatewood Bell had bought her as a yearling for $20,000 at the September sale, sent her to Eddie Woods as a 2-year-old, and I bought her for $100,000 at the April sale.” Still noticeably immature by the time of the sale, Follow No One showed some athleticism while working a quarter on synthetic in :21 1/5.

“Eddie thought she'd run through her conditions,” Rankin continued, “maybe get black type – which is exactly what happened [third in the Alma North Stakes at three]. She had some little things to work through, but she had some talent. It's really exciting to have her get a really nice colt as her first foal.”

Upson Downs consigned Instant Coffee for Sagamore at last year's September sale, and the dark brown colt brought $200,000 from Joe Hardoon, agent, and races for Gold Square LLC. “He won his maiden at Saratoga the week before the September sale,” Rankin recalled, which advertised the upside potential of his year-younger half-sister, a filly by Frosted (Tapit). Upson Downs sold their filly at the 2022 Keeneland September sale for $160,000 to HR Bloodstock.

Follow No One slipped to Speightstown (Gone West) but is in foal to Maclean's Music (Distorted Humor) for 2023. A mate for next spring hasn't been chosen.

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