Chris McGrath | Horse Racing Free Tips

This Side Up: Whether For Hard Profit Or Soft Power, Passion Is No Commodity

It's the transfer window over in Europe–and not just because they're between soccer seasons. They have also seen big money paid, both at auction and in private trade, to switch jockey silks at Royal Ascot this week.

A couple of the top races have been won by a significant new investor, Wathnan Racing. Apparently, the people involved were eager to maintain a low profile, but it's tricky to remain incognito when the meeting's most storied trophy is being presented by the new King of England while Frankie Dettori, that least retiring of retiring jockeys, is cavorting in your colors in the foreground.

Though unable to be present himself, the man behind Wathnan was duly revealed as the Emir of Qatar, whose brother and cousin have already been valued investors on the European Turf for some time.

The British breeders who respectively sold the Emir homebreds to win the G1 Gold Cup and G2 Queen's Vase are both indebted to the priceless heritage of British racing, which keeps it far more competitive than its internationally inadequate prizemoney would otherwise allow. Investment from overseas–whether in deals like these, or at public auction–is often the only thing that can keep a British racing and breeding program in the game.

Over the years, of course, the wider debt of horsemen everywhere to Middle Eastern investment has been incalculable. Primarily this has been animated by personal passion, for the horse. With time, however, the Maktoums also began to explore sport's value to the kind of agendas that come under the umbrella of “soft power.”

Two Phil's | Coady Photography

That's an increasingly important element in the other, far more prominent transfer window of the European sporting summer. This week A.C. Milan supporters were shocked by the abrupt defection of young midfielder Sandro Tonali to Newcastle, a British club recently catapulted into the elite by new Saudi ownership. Tonali, a boyhood Milan fan, is a born leader and nobody envisaged him being anything other than club captain a decade from now. That even he should turn out to have his price, then, will have spooked even supporters of rival clubs, who will see that no player can nowadays be considered safe from poaching by wealthier leagues. Indeed, a massive recruitment surge by Saudi Arabia's own domestic league may yet require the English Premier League, accustomed to devouring the best of the rest, eventually to have a taste of its own medicine.

In our own sport, the Big 'Cap once represented the most glittering of prizes. But nowadays its obvious candidates are more likely to head halfway round the world to contest staggering purses in the desert. While racing obviously represents a trifling branch of the soft power tree, the insouciance with which the Saudis could lay on a prize so much bigger than even the G1 Dubai World Cup means that we cannot be surprised by the recent experiences of golf and now soccer.

Yet whatever prompts the injection of cash, whether soft power or hard profit, everyone needs to remember that the lifeblood of all sport is investment of another kind: emotion. And if passion is treated as a commodity, you will ultimately invite disaffection. Because the one thing that can't be quantified on a balance sheet is the heart of a fan. That's about heritage, identity, formative experience.

This is just as true of racetracks as it is of soccer clubs. Okay, so you might make more money in the short term, for instance, by cashing out one of the most cherished spectator experiences anywhere on the Turf, at Arlington Park. But if we end up with a bunch of soulless gaming facilities, which happen to maintain ancillary ovals in front of deserted concrete sheds, then in a generation or two we won't have a sport at all.

In a world where everything is for sale, then, a horse like Two Phil's (Hard Spun) stands heroically against the tide. He reminds us that sport often depends, for fan engagement, on things money can't buy: pluck and luck.

Reverting to soccer, a lot of American investors (accustomed to sealed franchises) were perplexed when proposals for a European Super League had to be abandoned overnight after the clubs' own fans furiously rejected the removal of jeopardy. They understood, as the club owners didn't, how vital it is that even the biggest clubs, if performing badly enough, should be vulnerable to relegation; and equally that the little guy, showing sufficient merit, can supplant the underachiever.

Lord Miles | Ryan Thompson

Imagine what the Kentucky Derby would be like if restricted to horses that either cost seven figures, or homebred by six-figure covers. As it was, we could root for a blue-collar hero, whose connections had in effect been evicted from their cherished Chicago circuit by the ruthlessness of the same company that hosted the Derby.

Two Phil's was bred from the only Thoroughbred ever bought by the Sagan family (for $40,000) and was ignored by every expert in Book 1. Yet he absorbed a pace that burned off all those around him, before seeing off all bar a single closer.

Unlike Hot Rod Charlie (Oxbow), who once changed hands for $17,000 before showing a similarly big heart on the Classic trail a couple of years ago, Two Phil's was not asked to grit out another Triple Crown race. Instead, he resumes his campaign Saturday, eyeing an open sophomore championship, in the GIII Ohio Derby.

It's a hop from Lake Michigan to Lake Erie for many around his ownership crew, who will doubtless have noticed that the GIII Chicago S.–a race, it goes without saying, formerly staged at Arlington–has found its latest sanctuary downriver from Ohio, at Ellis Park, while the Churchill team deal with other issues. Their initial efforts to do so included standing down not just Lord Miles (Curlin), who also resurfaces in the Ohio Derby, but even the champion juvenile.

To that extent, at least, they understand how community engagement is crucial to commercial viability. Because the one transfer window that will never close is the one that allows fans to take their hearts–not to mention their business–elsewhere.

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This Side Up: First Among Equals

They talk about the glass ceiling, though back in 1992 Shelley Riley ran into something more like a glass wall. For a few strides, it looked as though she was going to make history as she watched Casual Lies–a Lear Fan colt she had found as a short yearling for $7,500–lead into the stretch with most of the Kentucky Derby field in trouble. But then that invisible barrier came down, and Lil E. Tee ran by to win by a length.

Her reward? Later that year, somebody claiming to represent a movie star approached Riley offering to buy into the horse, in the same breath mentioning the gentleman whose barn Casual Lies would then be joining. Naturally, the horse stayed where he was. And, whatever the progress meanwhile made by wider society, so did horse racing.

As has been pretty universally recognized, our community could not have been more fortunate in where fate finally found a female trainer to win a Triple Crown race. Jena Antonucci knows that her gender should be as irrelevant to everyone else as it is to Arcangelo (Arrogate), and it feels somewhat disrespectful that she should be constantly required to interpret such a momentous personal milestone as though she has arrived in our midst as some kind of gender token. But she has generously reconciled herself to that particular indignity, in order to help articulate and address those shared by all women.

And while it's embarrassing that the American sport had to wait until 2023 for this moment, actually the situation is still more flagrant in my homeland. With the likes of Criquette Head-Maarek and Jessica Harrington having won so many big races in Europe, guess how many women currently feature among the top 30 of the British trainers' championship? Two, maybe? (As is the case, thanks to Linda Rice and Brittany Russell, in the American standings.) Surely not just one?

Well, close, but the answer is one fewer than that.

That deplorable state of affairs suggests that the people investing in British stables, along with their management teams, are an even more stubborn crew than the handicappers. For the latter have grasped that Rachel Blackmore, who has raised the bar so high in jump racing, is not just the best female jockey but the best jockey, period.

If I had to confess to a candidly sexist generalization, simply from the demographics prevailing in a particular culture in a particular time, it would be that women, if anything, might have a more natural engagement with horses. Be that as it may, it would plainly be impossible for anyone to maintain the slightest coherence in proposing that they might, in any way, be less qualified to train racehorses.

Historically, admittedly, women trainers may have had to meet additional challenges, in terms of asserting the kind of authority they were chronically denied in so many other workplaces. And it is not as though those battles have been definitively won elsewhere, for instance in politics or business. But their current profile in this profession suggests a culpable failure, in our community, to match even such progress as has been painfully achieved in other walks of life.

Jena Antonucci with Arcangelo the day before the Belmont S. | Sarah Andrew

So much so, that arguably it should be incumbent on those in a position to influence behaviors to exercise some positive discrimination. Given the gender ratio among licensees, after all, that's nothing like as tough as it should be. But perhaps these billionaires should be saying to themselves: “Right, my team is about to hit the sales. At the end, I'm going to ensure that at least [for instance] two of my eight new yearlings go to female trainers.” Is that so much to ask in a world containing, say, Josie Carroll and Cherie DeVaux?

We know the chicken-and-egg element in any trainer's reputation: get some good material, win some good races, get better material. Of course, I'm not saying that all trainers would do equally well with the same material. But if we truly believe in merit, then the only way for the training profession to become a true meritocracy-and to achieve the requisite volume of female entry-is for the role models to have proper respect and opportunity. As it is, Antonucci had to seize her moment with a $35,000 yearling, hardly an exponential leap from the $7,500 Casual Lies.

Out of nowhere, and in its hour of need, Antonucci has stepped up to the plate not just for her sex but also for her sport. This is a person who had already shown exemplary ambition in terms of a more holistic, acorn-to-oak approach to the Thoroughbred's career. But even her uninhibited exhibition of excitement and joy, during the race last Saturday, offered us something valuable. This was not female joy; it was human joy. It was something that anybody would aspire to share.

A year before a woman named Jena found her platform in the Belmont, the same race had allowed one named Jana to share her experiences in a world dominated by men. Jana Barbe and her husband Roy had raised a Belmont contender, We the People (Constitution), despite being relative newcomers to the game.

She acknowledged the Turf to have proved a conservative environment, in need of more diversity in every way. But this is a corporate highflier who used to come home from work “picking shards out of my head” from that notorious glass ceiling. When she graduated law school, in 1987, the percentage of female equity partners at big law firms was 15 to 18 percent, and the goal was 20 percent. The goal today? Still 20 percent.

So, what Jena did last Saturday was what Jana urged last year, when discussing the only way to achieve change. “One person at a time, one foot in front of the other, and being really smart in how we go about it,” she said. “We will get there. Because we have to. In the end the sport will become integrated because it can't not.”

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This Side Up: Plus Ca Change….

At a time when so many people seem to be allowing a duty of vigilance to crumble into morbid defeatism, it seems a little unfair that our sport should be going through such a hard time even as we approach the 50th anniversary of the most luminous tour de force in the story of the modern breed.

Of course, as some powerful evocations of the time have lately reminded us, Secretariat arrived as a sunbeam into a wider world darkened by Vietnam and civic unrest. And nor should we deceive ourselves that even our own, notoriously insular community was back then immune to some of the things that vex us in 2023.

For instance, without reprising what have doubtless become tiresomely familiar objections to tinkering with the Classic schedule, let's not forget that Secretariat faced down a Triple Crown drought stretching to Citation in 1948. Obviously a still longer wait followed Seattle Slew and Affirmed, but we've found two horses equal to the task in the last eight years. Even so, the trainers are somehow trying to bully us into reconciling the paradox that they want more time between the races and therefore (assuming this indeed renders those races more competitive) to extend the intervals between precisely those Triple Crown winners that supposedly represent our best route to wider engagement.

Well, the world moves on. And it's not as though the Thoroughbred has ever permitted hard and fast rules anyway.

On the one hand, it's pretty unarguable that the old school, by exposing their horses more, helped the public to develop a rooting interest. If Flightline (Tapit) was perhaps as talented as we've seen since Secretariat, in making just six starts he barely scratched the surfaced of national attention.
And I do like to think there were other, incidental gains in the aggressive campaigning of horses, whether in terms of educating the animal or showcasing the type of genes that breeders should wish to replicate. But if Mage (Good Magic) is only the latest proof that modern trainers can prepare a raw horse even for a challenge as notoriously exacting as the Kentucky Derby, then let's roll back to that summer of '73.

Okay, so Secretariat himself had made nine juvenile starts from July 4. But if you would presume experience to be an asset at Churchill on the first Saturday in May, then how much more crucial should it be for the template itself, the most venerable race of all: the Derby at Epsom, that crazy rollercoaster with its twisting hill? Yet half a century ago, in a field of 25, the race was won on only his second career start by Morston (GB).

He was bred for Classic stamina, at any rate: by St Leger winner Ragusa (Ire) out of an Oaks runner-up (herself by a St Leger runner-up) who had already produced the 1969 Derby winner Blakeney (GB). Ragusa, incidentally, was out of a mare imported from a very old American family that had earlier produced Hard Tack, the sire of Seabiscuit. The St Leger, remember, is run over 14 furlongs. As the Japanese have reminded us, the lifeblood of the Thoroughbred is not brute speed but class: the ability not just to go fast, but to keep going fast.

That is certainly the hallmark of Galileo (Ire), whose legacy saturates the 244th running of the Derby on Saturday. With 93 juveniles and just a dozen yearlings still to come, he is represented by a single son, Artistic Star (Ire), unbeaten for one of the outstanding trainers in Europe yet available at tempting odds. Of the remaining 13 starters, eight are by sons of Galileo (including two by principal heir Frankel {GB}); two are out of his daughters; and one is out of a mare by another of his sons. That leaves just two runners to have bobbed to the surface of a European bloodstock industry that squanders mares, by the thousand, on stallions that cannot remotely satisfy the definition of class given above.

But, yes, the world moves on. Sometimes it just moves on in the wrong direction. It's a pretty dismal reflection on where our sport stands today that its greatest race has been shoehorned into the middle of lunch to avoid the F.A. Cup Final. Because what American readers may not realize is that this particular soccer match, in its heyday, also once brought England to a standstill—but has in recent years, even as the game has boomed, also lost much of its popular traction. With many managers resting star players for this tournament, you might even say that the F.A. Cup has shared the same decline in popular culture as the Derby (for which Parliament itself used to take the day off).

Fixed television schedules are also a thing of the past, with the young especially expecting to do most of their viewing “on demand.” That puts live events at a premium. In Britain, however, broadcasting rights for the most prestigious sporting events—including both the F.A. Cup Final and the Derby—are ringfenced for free channels. (Which obviously invites the paradox that the most coveted events, with no competition from channels with subscription revenue, are least likely to achieve their true market value.) Unusually, the F.A. Cup Final is broadcast simultaneously by both the BBC and ITV. And since the latter also has the rights to the Derby, racing has been unceremoniously shown its place.

By an unmissable irony, the match that has elbowed the Derby aside is being contested by Manchester City and Manchester United. As such, it is what the soccer world knows as a “derby” match between local rivals. The origin of this usage is tenuous, but some have ascribed it to the Epsom race. Horseracing, after all, long precedes football (in all its variations) in popular culture.
Yet now we find the Jockey Club taking out injunctions in anticipation of animal rights protests, even for a race in such innocuous contrast to, for instance, the Grand National. And that is without the current traumas of Churchill Downs having remotely penetrated wider consciousness on that side of the pond.

But let's resist adding another “basso profundo” to the prevailing chorus of miserabilism. Let's hope for another infectiously exciting chapter in the Epsom epic: maybe a final Derby for Dettori, who has already won two of three British Classics on his farewell tour; or perhaps one more for another old master, Sir Michael Stoute.

His runner hadn't even seen a racetrack before Apr. 20. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mage! Passenger (Ulysses {Ire}) is actually out of a War Front mare. Fifty years on from Morston, then, perhaps Passenger would be an apt reminder that the more the world changes, the more it stays the same.

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A Different Role but Still Made to Measure

Keeneland Breeders' Spotlight

When Saint Ballado came to the farm, Duncan Taylor recalls Les Brinsfield telling him to try Mari's Book mares.

“Mari's Book!” he exclaims now. “It's not like there were Mari's Book mares all around, out there in the population. But Les was a smart guy, very analytical.”

And it was easy to see the logic: Mari's Book was by Northern Dancer out of a Maribeau mare; and Maribeau, like Saint Ballado's sire Halo, was out of Cosmah–whose half-sister Natalma, of course, gave us the sire of Mari's Book. Plenty of genetic wheels within wheels there, then.

“So we bought this mare by Mari's Book, Goulash, [for Aaron Jones] and bred her to Saint Ballado four times,” Duncan resumes. “And we got like three stakes winners, one of them being Ashado. And it really made the stallion. But then Mr. McNair had a mare with very similar breeding, and I kept saying, 'You've got to breed her to Saint Ballado, got to!' So he did. And he got a swayback.” He chuckles. “Named it Duncan.”

Just one snapshot, this, of the breadth of experience that have given the Taylor brothers their plain-talking sense of how to make the best of a difficult game; and a wholesome, hard-headed scepticism about any theory or system purporting to make it easy.

And that, in turn, is why we've seized the pretext to visit two of them, Duncan and Mark, in a rather different capacity from the usual: to hear how the family ended up breeding an elite sprinter in Sibelius, winner of the G1 Golden Shaheen in Dubai.

Taylor Made is obviously far better known as the largest consignor in the business, and also for standing the likes of Not This Time, the sire of Sibelius. But anyone familiar with the energy and imagination they have always brought to their principal roles can only be curious to hear how they adapt their know-how to the kind of challenge that occupies the majority of their clients.

“Anytime you're big, you get exposed to more people, with more theories and more thoughts,” reasons Duncan, who formally handed over to Mark as President and CEO last year but remains a vital influence as Senior Consultant. “So you're able to soak those in, and get to talk about lots of different aspects. Where a guy that's out on his farm with his 15 broodmares, that's all he is focused on. He can read all the books, but–well, we're not even trying to hear stuff and we hear it.”

And that ties into a parallel conviction: that the best breeders, historically, have been able to weave many different strands of horsemanship together.

“I'm not knocking anyone else,” stresses Duncan. “But in my lifetime, just watching what's gone on, there's been two or three people that you just thought really knew what they were doing. John Nerud was one, Alec Head was another. There was a guy named Bob Bricken at Elmendorf that was a guru of breeding. And, like Tesio himself, what did they have in common? They basically had a 360-degree view of every horse. They knew how to train, knew how to raise horses. And they were around every single one, watching and looking and trying to figure out what worked best where.”

Mark Taylor | Keeneland

“Nobody is going to breed a terrible stall-walker to a terrible stall-walker,” agrees Mark. “Nerud, if he trained the sire and the dam, would know that this filly had a lot of talent but wasn't so good between the ears. So he'd need to give her something to balance that out. But a lot of these people doing matings on a computer, honestly they may never even have seen the mare or the stallion and they certainly have no idea about any of these other characteristics.”

And even when a Nerud or a Head noticed a recurring motif, they didn't make sweeping extrapolations.

“Say they see a Nodouble mare coming through this, this and this, and they could all run,” Duncan says. “Well, if I brought up a Nodouble mare that looked the exact opposite, they would know: 'Just because that S.O.B. is by Nodouble, it isn't the Nodouble that I want. I want one that looks like this one over here.'”

And seeing the bigger picture cuts through the whole program. “When you have control over the entire operation, you're not sending your horse to Trainer X,” Duncan says. “Because Trainer X is thinking, 'I could probably back off this horse and he would be okay later on, maybe win a stake or two. But he might be my only chance ever to win a Kentucky Derby. So I'm going to keep training hard on him.' And then he breaks down.

“Whereas if Nerud had him, he'd have said, 'Nope, we ain't running in the Derby. Back to the farm, and give him all he needs.' Because when that horse hits, it affects the value of eight others in his operation.”

The Taylors' own remarkable story, of course, attests to the fruitful combination of nature and nurture. Their father Joe literally wrote the book on farm management, having supervised Gainesway for 40 years; and any congenital flair for horses was further underpinned by the discipline and faith of their upbringing. And whatever they have in common, even this closest of clans are hardly cookie-cut, whether in aspect or outlook.

Duncan Taylor | Keeneland

“Well, we had eight in our family,” muses Duncan. “And you can see a common look. But we're all different–and it's a 100% nick. It's the exact same with horses. The evolutionary scheme of genetics has so many variables.”

No guarantees, then, but nonetheless there are plainly rewards available if you put the work in. Another thing Duncan did when Saint Ballado arrived, for instance, was create a scoring system on every mare ever bred to his full-brother Devil's Bag.

“Let's say the ancestor was Buckpasser,” he explains. “Anytime Buckpasser was in the first six generations, I said, 'Okay, was it a stakes winner or not?' So if it was one-for-49, I know I don't like a lot of Buckpasser in there. And so on, for all the relatives. I had them in an alphabetical order and knew the rate that they hit at. And as Saint Ballado came through the ranks, we started keeping the same statistics. You're trying to see which ancestors are going to go with the horse, and sometimes you'd find others carried along the same way.”

But only sometimes.

“And what you find in this business is that most people want a simple answer,” he continues, in exasperated tones. “If there's 12 pies here, they want to be told that this one will taste best because it has half the ingredients my grandmother used, and she baked a hell of a pie. But the other half of the pie, we don't know what the damned ingredients are. And when I eat it, it doesn't taste like grandma's. But that pie brings more.”

“It's the microwave mentality, unfortunately,” Mark adds. “Whether it's accurate or not, they don't care, they just want something they can understand. So I get into fights all the time with people that just get fixated on one tool, which a lot of times will send you in totally the wrong direction. To me, if you look at what works on 'blood' then you find a lot of times it makes sense as a physical mating, from a conformation perspective.”

Sibelius wins the G1 Golden Shaheen | Erika Rasmussen

But we're forgetting why we troubled these gentlemen in the first place. And this Sibelius (targeting his first start since Dubai in the GII True North S. at Belmont on June 10) is a nice story, bringing together some of the most cherished stalwarts of this remarkable family firm.

He's out of Fiery Pulpit (Pulpit), an unraced half-sister to graded stakes winner Clamorosa (Seattle Dancer), acquired as a 7-year-old for $55,000 at the Keeneland November Sale of 2011. There's quite a gang involved: Pat Payne, who might almost be another brother; Jeff Hayslett, who's been working here for over 30 years; and two of the farm's oldest clients, in Louis Brooks and Sam Pollock.

“This mare is a good example of any breeding success that we've had,” Mark says. “Because most of the mares we own are in partnership with customers. We've never aspired to go out and say we're going to build some world-class broodmare band, become great breeders. It's more just coming alongside partners, who like to be commercial breeders. And in this mare's case, it was an interesting group. Pat was a partner of ours. Jeff was our farm manager and then our first Thoroughbred Advisor. The Pollocks have probably been with us 30 years, and the Brooks family maybe 40. The first yearling I ever took to the sales ring was a Secretariat filly [co-]bred by Louis.”

(That was the old July Sale at Keeneland in 1983: Wayne Lukas gave $525,000 for her and, as Fiesta Lady, she ended up a Grade I winner.)

Fiery Pulpit had managed to produce a minor stakes performer by Broken Vow, a son of Unbridled, so they tried her with Unbridled's Song. The result was a $400,000 Keeneland September colt who won seven times. Next came a colt by Graydar, this time a son of Unbridled's Song: Peter O'Callaghan bought him as a Keeneland November weanling for $185,000, and he became a hard-knocking, 11-for-48 campaigner. Then a colt by Will Take Charge made $250,000 at Keeneland September.

The late Unbridled's Song, a cornerstone of Taylor Made's stallion barn | Taylor Made

“Before we got ahold of her, her babies weren't bringing anything at all,” Mark notes. “But just by knocking on this Unbridled's Song thing, she became a slot machine, paying off every year.”

Typically, however, the one exception was her foal from the first crop of Not This Time–who has turned out to be her best runner. Offered as a short yearling at Keeneland January, he was a $62,000 RNA and it was a similar story after he had been moved on, returned at $75,000 in the same ring that September. Bottom line, however, is that Sibelius currently has a 19-7-3-3 record: pretty robust, for a horse that didn't vet.

“He was a beautiful horse,” Mark emphasizes. “Just sesamoiditis. We got him sold privately. It's like Duncan's just been saying about breeding theories. Vetting, X-rays, they're a tool, get you part of the way. But people want to be told that it's simple.”

That said, commercial breeders nowadays tend to think about the ring sooner than the racetrack–a reality in which Mark cheerfully acknowledges complicity.

“My winning post is making money,” he accepts. “The one thing I don't have the luxury of doing is breeding something that might come out ugly, and the market's going to reject it, but it might be a great racehorse. I can't afford to do that. I'm trying to breed a good-looking horse.”

Sadly it feels as though age may be catching up with Fiery Pulpit herself. She required colic surgery and, donated to one of the Taylor Made sales team who has a small farm, successfully conceived to Catalina Cruiser. After Sibelius won in Dubai, Mark called and said: “Hey did you see that? She just got a Grade I winner!” Unfortunately the reply was: “Didn't you get my text last night? She had a dystocia, the foal died.”

So much can go wrong, at any time. But just as people shouldn't pretend that the game is easy, nor should we make the simple things complicated. A lot of it is common sense.

“Basically, when we're breeding a mare, we're looking at the value and we're looking at the conformation,” Duncan says. “And not only the conformation of the two horses. If the mare's had foals before, you look at those too. Because she might not be toed-in herself, but three of the first four foals have been. So you're not going to breed to one that toes in.”

Maybe you'd have bred her to Unbridled, though, as he toed out somewhat. Duncan, indeed, remembers the team more or less having to beg people to support the horse pending his first runners.

“And then Unbridled's Song comes out of his first crop, and Grindstone,” he recalls. “Well, if Unbridled's Song had died foaling and Grindstone broke down before the Derby, maybe he'd have been in Turkey or something.”

The margins are always so fine. Duncan remembers deciding that Mutakddim mares might work with California Chrome, whose damsire was a half-brother to that horse's dam. That was a Mari's Book type of call. But sure enough, just about the best runner Chrome left behind was Cilla, whose second dam is by Mutakddim.

“Of course all the knockers of my theory can say, 'Cilla's out of an Into Mischief mare, you can breed anything to that horse,'” he admits. “But Mutakddim, I picked a random horse. Most of his horses are in South America. And he ends up in the pedigree of California Chrome's best horse. So there's something to it. But if you bred every Mutakddim mare to California Chrome, it still might only be three or four out of 100 foals. And then two of them, the trainers mess up, and another one gets loose on the track.”

Current Taylor Made stalwart Not This Time | Mary Ellet

Back we come, then, to the holistic approach. Because it's no good getting everything else right, and then having the whole thing unravel because you haven't matched the horse to the right trainer.

“If you want someone to coach a bunch of egomaniacs that all want to be the star, and turn them into the Bulls, you get in Phil Jackson,” Duncan reasons. “Somebody else is coaching them, it probably would never have happened. Same with trainers. The mating's one key factor. But you could have the smartest mating in the world, and you have a bad trainer or a bad foaling man, it's never going to come to fruition. So you need a team.”

He mentions one highly successful program. Could just be lucky, maybe, but he ticks off the quality of its land, farm management, sales scouts, trainers. “And if that gets a stallion from 10% stakes winners to 15%, that's a hell of a change in the economic value of that stallion,” he says. “Because he becomes the superior horse.”

Conversely, some stallions face adverse odds from the outset. At a given market level, they will only tend to get mediocre mares–and that won't just tell in the genes.

“Mortality and conception rates are hugely important to a stallion,” Mark says. “With lesser stallions, the conception rate tends to be just not as good because most of their mares come from farms that don't have the same resources or organization. So from the very beginning that stallion has more to overcome.”

“There's so many variables,” concludes Duncan. “But if that's a curse, it's also a blessing. Because if it was easy to do, these rich people wouldn't be intrigued as they are. They know it's hard, and that's just what keeps everybody interested.”

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