This Side Up | Horse Racing Free Tips

This Side Up: John Keeps Bob Honest In Sham

We all trust that life must be better in 2021. But the immediate question is whether it will be ‘Good’ or maybe ‘Sweet’?

Right now, I’d settle for either. But it certainly looks an auspicious coincidence that the first race to sharpen focus on the Triple Crown trail–the opening leg of an adventure that reliably sustains us year in, year out–should include, among just five runners, one colt named Life Is Good and another out of Life Is Sweet (Storm Cat).

Their respective trainers, Bob Baffert and John Shirreffs, dominate the GIII Sham S. with two runners apiece. This, of course, was the race Baffert aptly chose last year to show that Authentic might just be the real deal. What a goofy animal he remained then, almost colliding with the rail as he hesitated to explore the overwhelming capacities lurking within. Despite virtually pulling himself up in the stretch, he won by nearly eight lengths: a spectacular overture to a campaign that will presumably see him formally anointed, later this month, as Horse of the Year.

The only colt ever to beat Authentic–if Swiss Skydiver (Daredevil) will indulge us a fairly technical distinction–was saddled by Shirreffs. Honor A.P. (Honor Code) seemed to do so on merit, too, but fortune scowled at him thereafter. As noted in our ongoing survey of Kentucky sires, Honor A.P.’s subsequent derailment (in running that extraordinary race behind Authentic in the Derby) does at least give breeders access to perhaps the most physically bewitching Thoroughbred of his crop at one-fifth the fee of Authentic.

Life Is Good arrives with a beguiling resemblance to Authentic, as another son of Into Mischief to have started out winning a sprint maiden at Del Mar in November. He did so in such flamboyant fashion, in fact, that Breeders’ Cup champion Essential Quality (Tapit) has suffered the indignity of being supplanted as the first horse named in the Derby futures pool. Certainly Life Is Good seems able to melt the stopwatch with little observable effort: the challenge here, much as was the case with Authentic, is to start stretching the trademark Into Mischief speed towards Classic distances. Baffert describes him as very aggressive, and an attempt to get him to rate didn’t really come off in a workout before Christmas. But these obviously remain very early days.

Success breeds success, and Baffert has earned the right to become a standard destination for a $525,000 Keeneland September machine like this. How interesting, then, to see Life Is Good accompanied by a horse of a wildly unfamiliar profile: Medina Spirit is by Protonico and was a $1,000 short yearling, pinhooked by Christy Whitman for $35,000 as a 2-year-old back at OBS this past summer. If he can upset in this race, he will give breeder Gail Rice hope that 2021 may yet prove every bit as remarkable as 2020, when Speech (Mr Speaker)–a filly she bred from a $7,500 mare–won the GI Ashland S.

Anyhow, the force certainly remains with this record-breaking barn, which also houses a monster with the potential to dominate the older horses this year, judging from that staggering comeback by Charlatan (Speightstown) in the GI Runhappy Malibu S. As such, possibly Shirreffs can feel some empathy with the horse whose memory is honored in this race. What a time to be a self-effacing genius training in California!

Sham is famously thought to have run the second-fastest Derby in history, but was unfortunately foaled in the same crop as the fastest of them all in Secretariat. He came back, moreover, with two front teeth dangling grotesquely from his jaw after slamming his head against the gate. What a wonderful horse he was: as statuesque as he was brave. Spared the attentions of Big Red, Sham won the GI Santa Anita Derby in 1:47 flat. And how skillfully he was prepared for the Classics by Frank ‘Pancho’ Martin, whose horsemanship was inherited by his late son Jose, trainer of the flying Groovy (Norcliffe); and in turn by his grandson Carlos–as evinced in the career of Grade I winner Come Dancing (Malibu Moon), who missed almost her whole sophomore year but has shown unfailing appetite as a nine-for-19 millionaire.

Both Sham and Secretariat were out of Princequillo mares. So, too, was Kris S.–the damsire of Life Is Sweet, saddled by Shirreffs to win the GI Ladies’ Classic the same year Zenyatta (Street Cry {Ire}) beat the gentlemen at the Breeders’ Cup.

For Shirreffs to try Life Is Sweet’s son Waspirant (Union Rags) in a Grade I straight after breaking his maiden speaks rather better for his potential than did his performance on the day. Barnmate Parnelli (Quality Road) apparently arrives on a more positive curve, having run both Hot Rod Charlie (Oxbow) and Spielberg (Union Rags)–rivals that have amplified the form in the meantime–close before finally breaking his maiden.

Shirreffs saddled the disappointing favorite against Spielberg in the GII Los Alamitos Futurity S., Red Flag (Tamarkuz), who had previously romped in the GIII Bob Hope S. But one way or another, it’s good to see him with several youngsters standing up to Baffert in his own backyard. None appears to have quite the charisma of Honor A.P., from this remote vantage anyway, but what I do know is that they are in the very best of hands.

The past five Sham winners include four subsequent Grade I winners in Authentic, McKinzie (Street Sense), Gormley (Malibu Moon) and Collected (City Zip): three for Baffert, one for Shirreffs. You can be pretty confident, then, that what this field lacks in quantity will be redeemed in quality. Earlier winners Goldencents (Into Mischief) and Tapizar (Tapit) later confirmed an affinity for the track in winning the GI Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile; while Colonel John (Tiznow) returned to win the Santa Anita Derby on his way to the GI Travers S.

But the name that resonates right now, from the roll of honor, is 2006 winner Bob And John (Seeking the Gold). Though actually named for Stonerside owner Bob McNair and manager John Adger, this race reminds us that another Bob, for all his fantastic achievements, is not the only show in town–even on the West Coast. Yes, he’s the greatest showman. But he will absolutely respect the understated John who takes him on again today.

In fact, if 2021 is really going to be a better year, then there could hardly be a happier symbol than the induction of Shirreffs, however appalled by the attention, into a Hall Of Fame whose members will surely feel their own distinction diminished until it is shared by him. In this era of industrial numbers, he remains a professor of the old school, and recent inductees like Mark Casse and Steve Asmussen have duly banked far more prizemoney. Likewise Todd Pletcher, who becomes eligible for induction this year. Per starter, however, Shirreffs has earned $16,132 compared with scores of $18,043, $10,002 and $7,755 respectively for Pletcher, Casse and Asmussen. Take Zenyatta out of the equation, moreover, and Shirreffs would still be at $13,852.

The best measure of a champion is the rival who does not permit him complacency, even in his own dominion. That was true of Secretariat and Sham. And it’s true of Bob and John.

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This Side Up: The Elusive Lesson of ‘Can’t Miss’ Sires

He has trademarked the move, his name reliably invoked whenever a horse picks off his rivals with the kind of flair that luminously separates him from the herd. Yet just about the only time I ever saw one glide through an elite field with quite the same extraterrestrial contempt as Arazi (Blushing Groom {Fr}) in the 1991 GI Breeders’ Cup Juvenile was the following May, at the same track, when that nimbus-among-the-shadows exhibition was reprised along the backstretch by a horse called… Arazi.

His discovery of mortal limitations, both in his second season and then at stud, has become so integral to the Arazi narrative that we tend to forget how he maintained the exquisite illusion until suddenly exchanging the wings of an angel for feet of clay at the top of the stretch in the GI Kentucky Derby. (Or, strictly, knees of clay.)

The whole story, with all the symmetrical and didactic properties of parable, came back to me this week on learning of the death of Congaree–a charismatic creature in his own right, who shouldered nearly alone the burden of his sire’s honor. For even Arazi’s decline on the track could not prepare us for the anti-climax of a stud career that took him ever more forlornly from Newmarket to Kentucky, Japan and even Switzerland.

Congaree, in turn, proved a disappointing stallion. Between Kentucky, New York and Texas, he mustered just 13 stakes winners. That was still two more than dad. Hardly the dividends anticipated from horses packaging so many attributes that any right-thinking breeder would seek to replicate. Congaree, remember, was in training for five seasons; he contested 22 consecutive graded stakes, winning five Grade Is besides placing in two Classics; and his 1:33.11 in the first of consecutive wins in the GI Cigar Mile (a unique distinction) was the fastest dirt mile of 2002.

Congaree at Del Mar in 2003 | Horsephotos

It so happens that his loss coincided with my resumption of an annual ritual: a comprehensive survey of the Kentucky stallion market, which we began yesterday and today with newcomers for 2021.

While their track achievements will clearly govern both quality and quantity in their opening books, in principle these horses have all been brought back to a new starting gate. The world is at their feet, each and every one launched with impassioned conviction by farms across the Bluegrass. And while the promotional material sometimes succeeds in stirring only a wholesome scepticism, you always retain in the back of your mind the way Into Mischief or Tapit looked when they first arrived at stud.

Assessing new stallions, some people are credulous enough to buy into ostensibly sophisticated predictive tools. But most horsemen know these shortcuts for what they are. All you can do, at the outset, is weigh the evidence with due vigilance on behalf of the breed. That might not always get you aboard the elevator on the ground floor. But it’s better to wait for more tangible evidence, from early stock and runners, than to corral huge books of mares for a new stallion that happens to claim a superficial resemblance to some commercial template.

My instinct, for instance, is that the entire European gene pool will ultimately forfeit its present strength–easily measurable, on turf at any rate, by the recent success of imports to America, whether from the yearling sales or the racetrack–by the opportunist recycling of garbage that catches a plausible glister from a passing sunbeam, and is duly presented as sharing the same, immanent glow of some authentically potent predecessor.

North America’s current top sire, Into Mischief | David Coyle

In Britain and Ireland, especially, the most marginal accomplishment in juvenile sprints has become an unthinking formula for the siphoning of mares, literally in their thousands, away from alternatives with at least some eligibility to produce a Classic racehorse. The result is a virtual Classic monopoly for the same blood, often concentrated in the same hands; and a ticking time bomb that will eventually pulverise the European breed to the point that its sharpest horsemen will belatedly recognize a cue for speed-carrying American blood, much as happened with the Northern Dancer dynasty.

On both sides of the ocean, unexpected success for a stallion can launch phony imitations by the dozen. Personally, however naively, I prefer to adhere to the time-honored precepts of pedigree, physique and performance. But even the few stallions that unhesitatingly tick all three boxes bring no guarantees.

Arazi lacked size, of course, but that didn’t stop his sire Blushing Groom (Fr) nor his damsire Northern Dancer. There was also a conformation issue, judging from that notorious knee surgery the winter after the Breeders’ Cup. Yet it still seemed as though appropriate matings could not fail to draw out the seams of gold in his pedigree.

In counterweight to his damsire, Arazi’s top line took the other (Nasrullah) highway to Nearco. There were other striking echoes within his family tree: Native Dancer figured both through Northern Dancer’s mother Natalma and Arazi’s third dam, who was by Raise a Native; while there was a variegating top-and-bottom footprint for Wild Risk (Fr), as damsire of Blushing Groom and grandsire of Arazi’s second dam, who was by Le Fabuleux (Fr).

Wild Risk apart, Arazi’s phenomenal talent could not have had a more obvious genetic bedrock: not least through his second dam, whose kinship to many classy performers and producers was crowned by her sibling Ajdal (Northern Dancer), another highly flamboyant European champion.

Northern Dancer | Tony Leonard

Ajdal, the most expensive yearling buyback in history before his private acquisition by Sheikh Mohammed, certainly went to stud lavishly equipped with the three P’s. (Performance was briefly an issue, until he famously dropped from 12 furlongs at Epsom to six in the G1 July Cup)! Sadly, he shattered a leg after a single season at stud, which in those days still translated into just 35 foals. Remarkably, three daughters would go on to produce Group 1 winners.

Congaree, for his part, did have a curious pedigree, loading Northern Dancer 3×3 through his forgotten damsire Mari’s Book. But anyone who claims that Arazi’s failure was predictable to anyone with the right software is peddling snake oil.

I prefer to view him as another of those lessons in humility so routinely handed out by the Thoroughbred. Ultimately, after all, we’re talking about flesh and blood. Happily, in fact, we are still doing so–even as the venerable creature approaches his 32nd birthday. In retirement Arazi has enjoyed exemplary care at Stockwell Farm in Australia, still adored for a performance far more dramatic than anything authored even by Frankel (GB) (Galileo {Ire}), say, with his brutal, pour-it-on style; but essentially given the same respect and attention as we owe to any of these animals that so absorb our dreams, our toil, our craft–animals of uniform nobility, wherever they might rank in performance.

The three P’s need to work out often enough to keep our business viable; to keep the rich guy sticking up his hand for seven-figure yearlings at Keeneland or Saratoga. But actually it’s their scrambling that makes the whole game function. So long as outcomes sometimes remain unaccountable, whether in success or failure, then we’ve all got half a chance.

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This Side Up: If You Can Run, You Won’t Have to Hide

“When you figure it out, let me know.”

Those were the parting words of a highly esteemed breeder this week, after we exchanged a few thoughts on the diminishing viability of stallions once they have covered their first book of mares. Not that “diminishing,” as an adjective, is really equal to the case. I suppose you could diminish down a lift shaft, but it wouldn’t be the first word that would occur to you in the time available.

Spoiler alert: I haven’t figured it out. But I think I know where we might start.

We all know that most stallions never earn a fee higher than their opening one; and that things are nowadays getting tough even for stallions entering their second year. Such is the nervousness of commercial breeders about taking a yearling to market once its sire has been exposed even to the (highly unimaginative) judgement of the sales ring; never mind about sticking around long enough to see whether the stock can actually run.

Many farms have duly sought to incentivize loyalty to new stallions. Breed your mare to such-and-such a horse for his first two years, for instance, and you can come back gratis ever after. Of course, there’s a pretty bleak inference. By the time you get free access, many stallions may have reached a point where you would rather pay to go elsewhere anyway.

The woman who contacted me this week suggested that farms might extend the logic behind such schemes precisely to those stallions who are now going “cold.” Cutting their fees, she remarked, always feels like a kick in the teeth to those who supported them the previous year. Say you paid $30,000 for the foal in your mare’s belly; and now, even before its delivery, the same sire is down to $20,000. That puts a red flag over your foal straightaway, and will hardly encourage you to double down with a return cover.

Perhaps, then, farms could play nice with my breeder by going back to her and saying: “Look, we’re sorry about devaluing your investment in our horse. You believed in him, after all–and we still do. So we’d like to invite you back. If you’re prepared to persevere with him for 2021, at his new fee of $20,000, we’ll backdate that rate to this pregnancy as well.”

The farm would only get $40,000 for two covers, instead of the $50,000 due at the prevailing rates. But that’s still a whole lot better than $30,000 for one cover, plus zilch for the next year as the disgruntled breeder seeks sanctuary in some random freshman. In theory, remember, fee cuts are only made in the hope of encouraging custom–but how often do they achieve precisely the reverse effect?

Daredevil | Louise Reinagel

Even this kind of inventive concession might not be enough for breeders to whom any savings on fee may seem relatively marginal, relative to the depreciation invited by that red flag. But the farm, in that case, would still get to trouser its $30,000.

If farm and breeder can meet in the middle, however, the “cooling” stallion might yet be able to stay in the game a little longer; long enough, perhaps, to earn a more realistic assessment than is typically made of a single crop of juveniles, often by a stallion who only earned his place at stud by thriving with maturity round a second turn. And that, in turn, might even reduce the frequency with which farms cut their losses and sell a stallion overseas or into a regional program–which is akin to sticking that red flag right under the tail of your poor yearling.

Regardless of whether this suggestion would be practicable, or effective, the key is that stallion farms and breeders work together to break the vicious cycle devaluing the commodities traded by both. Because while their mutual arrangements ultimately only determine “supply,” both might enjoy greater security if the “demand” were better educated.

Gradually I am beginning to grasp how farms and breeders alike feel pretty helpless about the overloading of new stallions. Certainly the farm accountants would like nothing better than business balanced through the roster. As it is, everyone is at the mercy of the purchasers. Because it’s the guy sticking a hand up at ringside who really needs to put a premium on the horse bred to run, as opposed to the one produced merely to look the part on the rostrum.

There are two big problems in current purchasing behavior. One is that so much of it is driven by pinhooks: yet another commercial cycle, in other words, dividing the planning of a mating from the aspiration to win races. The other is that the professionals guiding end-users–veterinarians, agents and so on–are directing traffic to the show ponies. In some cases, okay, they simply want to avoid appearing at fault for any structural defects that may emerge later. In others, however, they are taking out a less pardonable insurance.

If they were trying to provide a real service for their patrons, they would buy or breed a horse by, for instance, the perennially under-rated Lookin At Lucky. But they don’t want to say: “Just look, sir/madam, at the fantastic value I have secured. I can only do that for you because everyone else is too dumb, or too scared, to risk walking back through the herd.” Instead they steer the action to stallion X, saying: “Don’t blame ME if this goes wrong. Because you can see the whole community of experts just loves this guy.”

And the commercial consensus can barely be dignified as “fashion,” which might at least last a year. Increasingly, they are mere fads. One of the main reasons why the big farms throw such numbers at their new sires is because a single headliner will serve as a fig leaf to the modesty of literally hundreds of other foals. A stallion’s entire career can hinge on a single member of his first crop. Horse A lands on a weak Grade I, with the right pace or track bias, and daddy is made. Horse B may be a street better, but he gets injured schooling in the gate and doesn’t run until he’s four. By then, the die is cast.

A couple of days ago we looked at the story, virtually the parable, of Daredevil–who was down to 21 mares when sold to Turkey after a quiet start by his first juveniles. Clearly, however, it’s extremely rare for such horses to leave behind an adequately stinging rebuke to earn a passage back home.

Sky Mesa | EquiSport Photos

The buyers may well retort that it’s not easy to find stallions like Lookin At Lucky. Most “proven” sires are, deservedly, also expensive ones. If there just aren’t that many around who reliably get you a runner at an accessible price, then the best you can do is take a punt on a new stallion–and hope that you have stumbled across the next Constitution, or Not This Time, or whoever.

But I can’t have that. Throw the same cavalry of mares favoring the rookies at many of those slugging away at that level between The Factor and Midshipman, say, taking in your Midnight Lutes and Sky Mesas and Mizzen Masts and so on, and do you seriously think your stakes ratio would be–well, “diminished”? Apart from anything else, moreover, why not take the same gamble at slashed fees on the many Classic-oriented stallions who haven’t really had a chance to establish their merit or otherwise, in their fourth or fifth seasons at stud?

To improve supply, we have to improve demand. We shouldn’t be dragging the spenders, the guys who come to the professionals for guidance, into our fitful, fretful, flighty pursuit of the quick buck. Do the right thing by the fellows with the dough, after all, and we’ll also end up doing the right thing by the breed. And, ultimately, we’ll make the whole business more sustainable.

In Britain, where prize money is notoriously inadequate relative to the cost of participation, they strive to fill the gap with heritage and pageant and the associated prestige. By the same token, if American horsemen want to sustain investment–in training fees, especially, which keep piling up even as your gamble on a freshman sire rapidly “diminishes” through the claiming grades–then they must work, above all, at the experience of ownership.

If the whole adventure can be made glamorous and fun and compelling, something that people of all classes will want to share with their friends (and vaunt to their enemies!), whether at Saratoga or Finger Lakes, then who knows? Maybe they might want to buy actual runners, rather than throw all their money at our oil-strike fantasies about a home run in the sales ring.

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This Side Up: Cutting Down Scepticism on Fees

Bought yourself a mare in Lexington this week? Good for you. You have kept the faith. In many cases, that will be because you have seen it all before: you’ve ridden out bumps in the economy, and eked out value from these stoical and enduring creatures by borrowing their impassive engagement with the patient rhythms of Nature. It’s a long game, after all, one that will absorb pandemics and presidential cycles like a passing April shower.

But even the longest journey starts with a single step. And many of you will already have had an assignation in mind for your new mare from the moment you first folded down the catalogue page.

As we know, the stallion farms have done their bit to animate a market stricken by anxiety about the current strain on the global economic system. All the big commercial operations have made headline cuts in fees for 2021, and I’m already salivating over some of the value to be identified in our annual winter appraisal of the stallion market.

Some people, however, have muttered their scepticism as to the substance of these gestures. Has there really been a comprehensive remodelling in the base cost of breeding a Thoroughbred? Or have farms merely camouflaged the decline they had invited in overpricing particular types of stallion?

Well, I thought that might be worth investigating. Intake by intake, I’ve taken a look at the relative decline, between stallions at different stages of their careers, at 12 leading farms in Kentucky. We know, after all, that few sires ever again command a fee as high as their opening one; and that they will generally take repeated trims until either discarded, or achieving something to suggest a long-term viability.

How much deeper than “normal”, then, were the cuts this time round? And where were they concentrated?

This table charts the decline, in each of the past two years, in the aggregate stud fees charged by sires at the same stage of their careers on these 12 farms.

It’s a broad-brush exercise, very soon complicated by stallion traffic in and out of the Bluegrass by the likes of California Chrome (out), Laoban (in) and Daredevil (out and in). But my feeling is that when these farm owners talk about us all being in this together, they could also be addressing their stallions. Because they do, in the round, appear to have led sires young and old out onto the high road to meet the breeders halfway.

If there is divergence in the angle of the knife making these cuts, then it’s not so much between stallions at a different stage as between stallions on different farms. And you won’t find it hard to decide which were in deadly earnest, and which were pretty much making standard business decisions about individual stallions who would have been in trouble anyway.

Authentic–priced at $75,000–is the most expensive of the 2021 intake of new stallions to date | Breeders’ Cup/Eclipse Sportswire

New stallions for 2021 vs. in 2020

I suspect that the one and only group of stallions that are being protected, as a class, will turn out to be those making their entrance to the market. These, presumably, are again guaranteed books of grotesque size; certainly a lot of them appear to have been priced that way.

But there’s no point comparing their fees with those who started last spring, as every intake varies in commercial appeal: a $150,000 tag for Justify, for instance, helped to elevate the aggregate fee value of those who started at these 12 farms in 2019 at $480,000, compared with $262,500 for those who began earlier this year. The point here is to compare the relative loss of value suffered, by each intake, at the equivalent point of their careers.

And that’s certainly instructive in the case of those who entered stud in 2020, whose first foals will be delivered in the new year. Collectively, the sampled farms send these stallions back to market in 2021 at an aggregate fee cost of $220,000, down 16.2% from the $262,500 they collectively charged in their debut season.

This is a major departure from the way studs have sought to maintain values at least until a first crop of weanlings has entered the ring. In 2020, by contrast, the same farms were able to charge $477,500 for sires entering a second season, virtually unchanged from an opening $480,000.

This time around, even the stars have been repriced–most strikingly at Spendthrift. A mare apiece to Omaha Beach, Vino Rosso and Mitole would have cost a total of $100,000 last spring; now you can get to them all for $75,000.

Sires with first-crop yearlings in 2021

The next group, meanwhile, is now reaching the stage–with their first yearlings about to go into the ring–when commercial breeders typically abscond to the next round of cadets, and books start to erode. This year, sires who entered stud in 2018 were charging $270,000 from $247,500, down 8.3%, with five of 13 taking cuts. But the group who entered stud in 2019 will be charging $382,500 from $477,500, down no less than 19.9% on their last set of fees. Only four of 19 stallions in this group have managed to hold their 2020 fees.

The Factor is an example of a sire whose fee has held | Lee Thomas

Fourth-year (and beyond) stallions

Next we reach a group that tends to cause breeders really to back off, unless their first yearlings have enjoyed a conspicuous market vogue. Because in his fourth year we start to learn whether a stallion’s first juveniles can actually run.

The sires who entered stud in 2017 duly eased their 2020 fees by 10.2%, from $317,500 to $285,000, albeit the majority of farms actually held their nerve and their prices. Those who entered stud in 2018, however, will be taking the equivalent step in the new year at $191,000, down fully 22.8% from $247,500.

Hereafter comparisons become harder. This is the crossroads of every stallion’s career, with the whims of the market now measurable against results on the track. So you’ll have one guy packing his bags for Turkey even as the next turns out to be Constitution, upgraded to $40,000 and now $85,000. In terms of aggregate fees, then, the winners will very often redeem the damage done by the losers. For present purposes, the flux is such that it is more instructive to assess those who come out the other side of this winnowing process.

For instance, the handful still on these farms with three crops of runners (entered stud 2015) are certainly sharing the pain. The bare half-dozen still in business will be charging $67,500 between them in 2021, compared with $85,000 in 2020 and $125,000 the year before.

Consolidation, already so difficult because of the commercial infatuation with unproven sires, is becoming harder and harder. Move on a couple of intakes, to those with a fifth crop of runners (entered stud 2013), and it speaks volumes for The Factor, say, that he can hold even a fee he has already outpunched when a studmate as accomplished as Union Rags must take a cut of no less than 50%.

With exceptions, even stalwarts like Tapit have seen cuts going into 2021 | EquiSport Photos

Benchmark sires

And what of those who set the standard; the happy few who, having established their merit and viability, represent the model for those still trying to make a name for themselves? Operating at all levels of the market, from War Front to plucky achievers like Midshipman, they comprise the solid foundation for the whole stallion industry.

Sure enough, after a long bull run in the bloodstock market, these older sires (a total of 35 across our 12 chosen farms) collectively maintained their covering value in 2020 at $2,280,000, up marginally from $2,225,000 the previous year. For 2021, however, despite the odd hike (Into Mischief, Uncle Mo, Speightstown and Munnings) they have slipped 8.2% to $2,041,500.

That’s just about half the percentage loss, then, of those embarking on their second season. Normally, these are the two stable bookends to all the fluctuations in between. But even this lesser erosion implies some exceptional opportunity among the kind of proven sires who can make a mare, who can build a family, pending any return to the mechanical commercial exploitation of unproven sires.

I do see, nowadays, how that kind of thing is primarily driven by breeders; and I no longer blame the farms for loading the books of new stallions when the resulting stock will be given such a brief window of opportunity on the track. At the best of times, farm accountants have a terribly difficult balancing act. And, in reacting to the present crisis, it looks as though that balance extends at least to their collective use of the scythe. Admittedly, you’ll find that the cuts may be a little more jagged on some rosters than others. But the overall result is that there is opportunity across the herd.

So if you do insist on using a newcomer, with such luminous value across the rest of the spectrum, then good luck in your incorrigibility. Because if the overall “supply” did need some kind of correction, then so too, unmistakably, does our demand.

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