Stallion Performance | Horse Racing Free Tips

Races in California and in Florida on Jan. 15 highlighted the high stakes that farms and breeders contend for in breeding each crop of racers. The highest stakes are played for the top stallion prospects each year, and the keystone of each new breeding season is the acquisition of these premium stallion prospects, who are the objects of intense competition from the leading farms in Kentucky.

The best-organized and -financed farms bid as much as the market will bear to bring in those highly attractive sire prospects and the consequent large books of mares and attendant prestige from working with leading breeders and marketers.

The result is that the top prospects for each crop are priced as high as the marketplace can accommodate, and the expectations for these highflyers are as high as their stud fees.

This isn't an evaluation of whether this is the most effective way to select stallions; it's just a description of the way the marketplace, especially in America and Europe, works in response to the stallion acquisition model currently in use.

Once the farms and their annual stallion prospects are into this process, there isn't much they can do except to provide the best opportunity, management, and promotion available to maximize their new sire prospects. And hang on for the ride.

Because there is a considerable amount of unpredictability in the stallion market on the performance side of the equation. First, there is the unpredictability of genetic transmission, and second, there is the unpredictability of training and racing Thoroughbreds.

The genetic transmission of athleticism and excellence is difficult to evaluate, but study of the results of stallion prospects' offspring on the racetrack shows us that fewer than half of the annual stallion prospects transmit their own genotype and phenotype effectively enough to become successful stallions; perhaps 15 to 20 percent do this well enough to be consistently good stallions.

Breeders, owners, buyers, sales companies, and advisers to all attempt to do this ahead of the curve, and inevitably, they are more wrong than right because most stallion prospects are going to fail.

The looming sense of failure is inevitable because most entities in racing score success by stakes victories and black type earned. With only about 3 percent of horses winning stakes annually, that means 97 percent do not. That's a statistical hump that is hard to get around, and the sire who does so with some finesse, in the manner of Mr. Prospector, Storm Cat, or Into Mischief, is a paragon of many virtues.

Faults be damned.

Any competent horseman could have looked at the progeny of the sires above and said he didn't like this, that, or the other. But those same sires didn't just tickle the brass ring, didn't just catch the ring. No, they hit that sucker so hard, they turned it into a dinner plate.

That's what a breed-changing sire can do and does. But this column is about the great majority of stallions and stallion prospects: those who don't get the ball out of the park, or at least not immediately.

The result of the intense competition among stallions, owners, farms, and trainers is that most stallions are surplus to needs after only a few years at stud. As a result, they are frequently sold on to racing jurisdictions that have room for a stallion with potential to work in their racing and breeding community.

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Among the most consistent buyers of American stallions over the past years are breeding organizations like the Korean Racing Authority, the Japan Bloodstock Breeders Association, and the Jockey Club of Turkey.

In the last weekend's racing, the results were littered with the names and the domestic descendants of stallions who have gone to stud in Kentucky, then been sold to stand elsewhere.

For instance, the Pasco Stakes at Tampa Bay went to Markhamian (by Social Inclusion), and his broodmare sire, Colonel John (Tiznow), is in South Korea. Leggs Galore won the Sunshine Millions Filly & Mare Turf Sprint, and her sire Bayern (Offlee Wild) is now at stud in South Korea after purchase last summer by Sangil Choi. Gatsby won the Sunshine Sprint at Gulfstream Park; his sire Brethren (Distorted Humor) is still evading 'gators in Florida, but his broodmare sire, Aldebaran (Mr. Prospector), was sold to stand in Japan, beginning with the 2009 breeding season. And at Santa Anita, Aligato (Kitten's Joy) won the Unusual Heat Turf Classic. The sire still enjoys considerable popularity in Kentucky, but the broodmare sire, Rock Hard Ten (Kris S.), was sold to the KRA in November 2012, and stood at their Jeju stallion station until his death on Nov. 17 last year.

Short of a change in the economics of stallion acquisition and management, this is the pattern of the present and the future.

The post Bloodlines Presented By Caracaro: When A Stallion’s Road To Success Takes A Detour appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

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From the evidence of the sums paid for stallion syndications and for price of nomination fees to these unproven sires, a reasonable observer would assume that there is a strong correlation between elite racing performance and its resulting stratospheric stallion valuations and then the progeny results of such horses on the racetrack.

That reasonable observer, however, would be incorrect.

There is a modest correlation between racing excellence and stallion performance; essentially every important stallion is a stakes winner, for instance. But you don't have to look very hard to find Danzig, who was unbeaten in three starts, none a stakes. Clearly, that very talented son of Northern Dancer was an aberration; had he enjoyed a fairly normal racing career, Danzig would have been a stakes winner and probably a stakes winner of very high merit.

Aside from stakes success as a general parameter of racing performance, however, the variability of the genetic material that a stallion provides to his offspring and the equal variability of how that contribution pairs up with a contribution from the dam make breeding effectively an exercise in randomness.

All this makes the prices of major syndications what we might generously call “optimistic.”

This was pointed out by the result of the Grade 2 Bernard Baruch Handicap at Saratoga. The Baruch was won by the New York-bred 4-year-old Somelikeithotbrown (by Big Brown), and the winner is from the first New York-conceived crop by the 2008 Eclipse Award winner as champion 3-year-old colt.

A winner in his only start at two, Big Brown improved massively to remain undefeated through victories in the G1 Florida Derby, Kentucky Derby, and Preakness. Heavily favored to complete the Triple Crown, Big Brown was eased in the Test of the Champion at Belmont Park.

The son of Boundary (Danzig) won his final two starts, a prep for the Haskell and the main event, then was retired to stud at Three Chimneys Farm in Kentucky to stand for a fee of $60,000 live foal. The other top horse retiring to Kentucky for the 2009 season was two-time Horse of the Year Curlin (Smart Strike), and both were scheduled to have stud fees of $100,000 or thereabouts before the Great Recession came crumbling down on everyone's head.

That debacle had the effect of lowering those two horses' stud fees by nearly half, to $60,000 for their first seasons. External factors did not make the economics of standing the two champions any easier, but the long-term challenge for each was to get horses of very high racing class.

Curlin answered in the affirmative, most strongly as his stock gained experience and maturity on the racetrack, and the champion chestnut has established himself as one of the premier stallions in the country with a stud fee of $175,000.

In contrast, however, Big Brown sired winners from large books of accomplished mares, and the regression to the norm seen in the quality of his racers produced a corresponding regression in the horse's stud fee.

To date, Big Brown has had nine crops of racing age, and from 584 foals of racing age (including 27 2-year-olds), he has 27 stakes winners, including seven group or graded stakes winners. The best of these was Dortmund, a smashing chestnut of giant proportions who won the G1 Santa Anita Derby and Los Alamitos Futurity, as well as running third in the 2015 Kentucky Derby behind American Pharoah (Pioneerof the Nile).

This is not an exercise in bashing Big Brown, who followed a good racing career with stud performance that is slightly above average: he sired a Grade 1 winner and a half-dozen other group or graded winners from 27 stakes winners. Few stallions do that much.

Average performance, even a bit better than average success, however, is not nearly enough to keep a stallion in Kentucky at a commercial fee under the present market circumstances. The pressures on stallions include the escalating book sizes that have some of the most in-demand stallions covering more than 200 mares in the Northern Hemisphere breeding season from February through early July; the dual-hemisphere shuttle system which sends some stallions to the Southern Hemisphere, where they will be working with another large book of mares; the demands of the sales market for large, correctly conformed, attractive, and well-matured yearlings or 2-year-olds; and then the racetrack demands to get racing stock that can win early and often, then show high form in graded company.

If a stallion prospect could know what lay in store for him, he'd just have a nervous breakdown and be done with it.

The horses who have the libido and physical health to handle the breeding demands, then to compound that by outperforming expectations with lots of good individuals who regularly perform at the highest levels, are rare creations indeed. That's what a top-class contemporary stallion has to provide, and it's a prescription to understand why there's only one Galileo, one Tapit, or one War Front every few years.

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