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Bloodlines: Aloha West’s Breeders’ Cup Sprint Adds To Hard Spun’s Growing Legend At Stud

Among the stallions whose stock enjoyed success at the 2021 Breeders' Cup, Darley's Dubawi (by Dubai Millennium) clearly scored the most with three winners: Yibir (in the Turf); Space Blues (Mile); and Modern Games (Juvenile Turf). All three victories came on the turf course at Del Mar.

In other stallion news, Gun Runner confirmed his position as the top freshman sire with Echo Zulu's impressive victory in the BC Juvenile Fillies, which almost certainly will translate into an Eclipse Award for champion juvenile filly, and Quality Road had a correspondingly impressive winner with Corniche, who is a virtual certainty as the Eclipse Award winner for champion 2-year-old colt.

Of all the sires of winners at the 2021 Breeders' Cup, however, the one who added luster to his resume at a most opportune time was the 17-year-old Danzig stallion Hard Spun, who stands at Darley's Jonabell in Kentucky.

Hard Spun has had a really good year as a sire in 2021, with Grade 1 Metropolitan Handicap winner Silver State and a half-dozen other stakes winners, including Grade 1-placed Caddo River. At the Breeders' Cup in full view of all the most important breeders and against the strongest competition, Hard Spun captured a major share of the limelight with the winner of the Breeders' Cup Sprint in Aloha West, whose victory pushed the sire into the top 10 stallions nationally by total progeny earnings for 2021.

Second in the Kentucky Derby to Street Sense and second in the Breeders' Cup Classic of 2007 to Curlin, Hard Spun was part of the splendid three-year-old crop of 2007 that included other star sires of the present like Horse of the Year Curlin (Smart Strike) and champion juvenile Street Sense (Street Cry). All three are important stallions in the immensely competitive Kentucky sire pool.

And of the three, Hard Spun would be viewed as the value play by many breeders, standing for $35,000 live foal in 2021 and 2022. For next year, Street Sense is set for a stud fee of $75,000, and Curlin is $175,000.

And yet Hard Spun has proven he can get the major racers, with 87 stakes winners, including Grade 1 winners Questing (Alabama Stakes), Wicked Strong (Wood Memorial), Silver State, and others.

Bred in Maryland by Bob Manfuso and Katharine Voss, Aloha West is out of the Speightstown mare Island Bound. The dark bay colt brought $160,000 at the 2018 Keeneland September sale, selling to Gary and Mary West, with their agent Ben Glass signing the ticket.

Various setbacks kept the handsome colt from racing at two and three, and he won his debut on Feb. 7 of 2021. Trainer Wayne Catalano noted that Eclipse Stables's “Aron Wellman spotted the colt after he won, and he inquired about buying the horse. The Wests and their agent Ben Glass always want to know if anyone wants to buy a horse, and they say 'yes' or 'no' about selling a horse. They sell a lot of horses. They don't know at the time just how they will turn out, and this one turned out really well. But Mr. West is a business man, and he makes business decisions.

“These are all wonderful people to train for, and sometimes, when the Wests are willing to sell a horse, I try to find owners to keep them in house. Mr. West is a great guy about allowing me to do that.”

Catalano said that he was especially happy to keep Aloha West, as the lightly raced 4-year-old colt “has a world of speed, and we knew there was ability there. But that colt has really shown so much willingness that he deserves to compete with the best.”

A nose away from winning three of his first four starts, Aloha West has also won three of his last four starts, but the Breeders' Cup Sprint was his first stakes victory. The dark bay has now won five of nine starts, all in 2021, and earned $1.3 million.

Aloha West is the second winner of a Breeders' Cup race for Hard Spun. His son Spun to Run won the 2019 Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile and stands at stud at Gainesway in Lexington.

With the pedigree and speed of Aloha West, there is clearly a spot at stud for him sometime in the future, but Eclipse Thoroughbreds has indicated that he will race in 2022, when he would obviously compete for further glory at sprints…and perhaps at somewhat longer distances.

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Bloodlines: Good Timing, Quick Decisions Brought Sandstone To The Winner’s Circle

On the day that Churchill Downs ran the Street Sense Stakes, Oct. 31, a daughter of the 2006 juvenile champion and 2007 Kentucky Derby winner won the companion feature, the Rags to Riches Stakes for fillies.

Bred in Kentucky by Mark and Cindy Stansell, Sandstone won her stakes debut by 10 3/4 lengths in 1:44.18, which was faster than the colts ran in the Street Sense Stakes at the same distance.

Sandstone is the last foal out of her dam, the Seattle Slew mare Seattle Shimmer, who was 20 when she foaled this stakes winner.

Mark Stansell said, “Sandstone was one of the very best physicals out of her dam, who always threw nice babies. Seattle Shimmer had a very nice hip and would put that hip on foals, even from stallions who were a little light behind,” and due to the yearling filly's appeal on physique and pedigree, the breeders got $165,000 for Sandstone at the 2020 Keeneland September sale.

“This was a really nice yearling,” Stansell said. “One reason she only brought $165,000 was that the foals from old mares, anything over 15, are not highly sought after [in the commercial market]. If that mare hadn't been old, Sandstone would have brought more. She was that nice.”

Now a winner in two of her three starts, the Rags to Riches was the stakes debut for Sandstone, and she became her dam's first stakes winner. Two earlier foals, Sway Away (Afleet Alex) and Shaken (Uncle Mo), placed in Grade 2 company. Sway Away was second in the G2 Best Pal, San Vicente, and San Carlos; Shaken was third in the G2 Rachel Alexandra.

Yet, they almost never were.

The dam of these three talented stakes horses, as well as other good winners, was one of the last foals by Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew (by Bold Reasoning), himself a foal of 1974. The near-black champion had problems with his neck vertebrae late in life that required surgery and curtailed the last years of his stud career.

A foal of 1999, Seattle Shimmer was bred in Kentucky by Albert Finney, and Mickey and Karen Taylor. She and her stakes-winning dam received the best of care, but when the filly was born, she was “severely contracted as a foal,” said Kentucky horseman Bob Sliger, who spent many years with the Eaton Farms yearling division.

Contracted tendons are not rare among Thoroughbred foals, and the condition's name accurately describes the problem. A foal's long tendons are tightly contracted, rather than loose and flexible, when the foal is born. This can cause considerable problems with standing and nursing, and if not addressed appropriately and as early as possible, the malady has the potential to cripple a foal for life.

Seattle Shimmer, however, was in good hands.

Sliger continued: “We used PVC pipe to help get her legs straightened out, and it helped her a lot. She was broken but never went into training. That's when they had just lost Seattle Slew, and they went out of the horse business. When they did that, they gave the mare to me.”

For Sliger and former Eaton Farms manager Billy Tillery, Seattle Shimmer bred some very nice prospects, including Sway Away.

Sliger recalled that “Mark had bought three foals out of the mare off me and was crazy about Seattle Shimmer. She was a beautiful mare, a kind and lovely mare. Just a sweetheart, and Mark really wanted the mare.”

Stansell said he “was buying weanlings to resell as yearlings, and I got to know Bob after buying the third foal out of the mare, went and bought mare and the foal at side, who turned out to be Sway Away.

“She is buried in my back yard, he continued. “I have 87 acres, but buried her there.”

To produce Sandstone, Stansell “bred her to Street Sense, and this was one of the very best physicals out of the mare.”

In addition to the other foals out of Seattle Shimmer, Stansell sold, then repurchased and raced Shaken, and the half-sister to Sandstone “has an exceptional Vino Rosso foal in Book 2 of the November sale,” the breeder concluded.

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Bloodlines: A Summer In Saratoga Generations In The Making

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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Bloodlines: How California Chrome’s Successful U.S. Runners Project For His Stud Career In Japan

In mid-November two years ago, the JS Company of Japan bought one of the most popular American racehorses of the past 20 years, Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner California Chrome (by Lucky Pulpit), and exported him to stand at Arrow Stud on the northern island of Hokkaido.

At the time of purchase, Keisuke Onishi of the JS Company noted that several of the young stallion's first-crop yearlings had sold well to buyers from Japan (four of the six highest-priced lots, in fact). Other factors that made the chestnut champion a horse of interest for Japanese breeders include the fact that California Chrome was a sound horse who raced effectively from age two through six (although the horse made only a single start in 2017 in the inaugural Pegasus), winning seven G1 races and $14.8 million.

In addition to soundness and high racing class, California Chrome is an outcross to the prevailing lines in Japan, especially that of Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Sunday Silence (Halo) and his sons Deep Impact, Heart's Cry, and Stay Gold. California Chrome does have both Mr. Prospector 3×4 and Northern Dancer 4×5, but those will be a generation further back in the younger stallion's foals.

So, as an attractive stallion for Japan, California Chrome presented racing class of a high order, physical quality and soundness over a lengthy career, and a pedigree open to easy matching with the prevailing lines in the Japanese broodmare population. Furthermore, nothing was known about the racing potential of his progeny, except what they looked like.

When the JS Company bought California Chrome, the horse had completed his third season at stud at Taylor Made Farm in Kentucky, and his first-crop were only yearlings. The chestnut champion arrived in Japan on Jan. 7, 2020, spent his time in quarantine, and then came to Arrow Stud on Jan. 29 last year. On the basis of race record and physique, California Chrome was greeted with enthusiasm from breeders in Japan, who sent him a large book of quality mares.

Now, the horse's first crop in the States is three, and according to Jockey Club statistics, there are 104 foals from the first crop by California Chrome, 93 current 2-year-olds of 2021, and 96 yearlings from the sire's last Kentucky crop.

From the first crop, California Chrome has four stakes horses, led by Cilla, who became her sire's first stakes winner with a victory in the Blue Sparkler Stakes at Monmouth Park on July 10, running 5 1/2 furlongs in 1:03.07, and another filly by the sire, Decade, was third in the race.

Cilla followed up that show of speed with victory in the Grade 2 Prioress Stakes at Saratoga on Sept. 4, becoming the first graded winner for California Chrome.

Scarcely more than a month later, California Angel, a 2-year-old from the stallion's second crop, became his second graded stakes winner on Oct. 13 with a win in the G2 Jessamine Stakes at Keeneland.

The latest graded stakes winner contributes two points of interest that offer hope for breeders in Japan that the stallion may be better suited to their condition than to those here in American. First, California Angel won her race on turf, which is the primary racing surface in Japan and the surface over which nearly all the important races are conducted, and also, she won her third outing going a mile and a sixteenth.

California Chrome himself won the G1 Hollywood Derby on turf, as well as racing effectively on all weather surfaces when called to do so. That he has sired a good winner on turf is a point in the right direction for breeders and owners in Japan.

In addition, California Chrome physically is a type that should fit well with the training and racing environment in Japan, with an emphasis on high fitness and racing a distance. The trainers there are historically known for their enthusiastic training methods, believing that their stock should be hard and fit for any amount of racing activity.

And Onishi commented that California Chrome was an average horse in build, not especially large or heavy, but tough in training and determined in his racing. Those are insightful comments because the American commercial market wants young horses that are big, strongly muscled, and rather hefty. These horses appear likely to have speed and early maturity, which are important in any sort of racing, but they are not the principal characteristics sought in Japan.

There, many of the good races are at 10, 12, or 14 furlongs (or their equivalents in meters), and as a result, horses with better balance and efficiency of motion are at a greater advantage there than in most of American racing. These differences will not guarantee that California Chrome will become a great sire in Japan, but his stock should get a fair trial over distances and conditions that should suit their physical aptitudes.

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