THE PEDIGREE CURMUDGEON

2011-09-08T08:45:00.001-05:00

Thoroughbred Pedigree, Genetics, and Performance Conference

2:00 p.m.

The conference now devolves into breakout sessions with several different speakers at the same time. Personally, I've had enough and I'm going to sign off here.

The biggest difference for me between this year's conference and the first one last year is that it was much more blatant that virtually all of the presenters represent commercial ventures and they have something to sell us. Given who the organizers are and the economic system we live in, this was never going to be pure science, but it is a little disconcerting to feel like the presenters are as or more interested in hawking products as disseminating information.

Cheers!
JPS

1:00 p.m.

Steve Roman begins the afternoon session.

Roman will cover his ideas on aptitudinal type. First begins by comparing different definitions of speed....i.e. final time, average speed, fractions. Stamina....speed over a distance or winning over a distance? Somebody has to win the race, regardless of speed. Any horse can run any distance if you give it enough time.

American time records fall in an almost straight correlation line, projected from the shorter distances. Roman calls that line the genetic frontier of speed. Although the times have changed, the shape and linearity of the line has not changed since 1976. That measures an increase in speed over the last 35 years.

Dosage not a breeding theory, not a handicapping scheme, or a betting scheme for Ky. Derby.

Defines dosage as a methodology applied to large populations for classifying pedigrees by aptitudinal type, as a research tool correlating type with real world performance.

Roman produces good slides that show that dosage index and center of distribution decline with distance both in the U.S. and every other country he's tested. The key point is that the line is highest for American dirt horses, which means, as Roman says that American dirt horses are the most speed bred horses in the world.

Roman spends a lot of time defending the dual qualifier concept, despite his earlier claim that dosage is not a handicapping tool. Unfortunately he has to expand the concept to include horses like Smarty Jones who were not rated on the Experimental Free Handicap.

11:15 a.m.

Jeff Seder of EQB up next on heart ultrasounds.

Begins by showing average for the breed statistics as a baseline level. Believes a lot of performance has to do with who is really trying and which ones will put up with pain.

Talking about a published study on heart ultrasound.

Study based on over 7k horses, divide those into categories, colts fillies, US, foreign, dirt-turf, etc.
How do you use heart data
Size of left ventricle at relaxation....fillies and colt sizes very different. Growth curves are different. Train diligently to insure reproducibility of heart measurements. Size and weight of the horse matter. Age is also critical to get accurate measurements. Thickness of the septal wall is also very important.

Horses ranking above the 75th percentile in left ventricle size earn more. No surprise.

These measures do tend to differ by sire and sire line. No surprise that Northern Dancer and sons produced very high percentages of big hearts and thick septal walls.

Trying to figure out which sires are going to produce big hearts is very hard to predict. Dynaformer for example tends to produce smaller hearts but with thick septal walls.

Lunch break.

10:00 a.m.

Bob Fierro and Jay Kilgore up next of DataTrack international on stride length

As usual, raconteur Bob starts off with a funny story about a trip to Argentina, where the mythical national hero shares his last name. Then he describes how DataTrack invented their Breeze Figs, which rate horses according to stride length and other measures at juvenile sales. DRF now publishes daily Breeze Figs for 2yos for their first four starts.

Graded SW have an average stride length of 24 feet or greater....drop down a level to listed winners and it's under 24 feet.....and so on.

Jay Kilgore gives some details on how their video analysis of stride efficiency works with stills of digital video. Fascinating video showing how horses feet move as they run. The computer attaches points as it were to the horse's feet, nose, etc. to measure efficiency of movement. Video showing lines that the points make through space are visually very effective.

9:40 a.m.

After several frustrating hours of being unable to connect to the wireless internet here at the Griffin Gate Hotel in Lexington, I am finally connected and ready to resume live-blogging.

John Seaman of Cecil Seaman and Co. just finished his presentation on breeding type to type.

Most of John's discussion was about their measurement of body length as an indicator of overall body size. He presented numerous slides showing how similar body types tend to predominate in the pedigrees of successful racehorses. This tends to be the basic message of biomechanics gurus. Mating horses with similar body types and measurements tends to work better than matings of dissimilar types. This will not be news to anyone who has been doing matings for 40 years. ....or, indeed, considerably less than that.

More to follow

2011-09-07T07:24:00.000-05:00

2011 Pedigree and Genetics Symposium, Lexington, Kentucky.

Professor Jamie McCleod of UK began the symposium by going over basic genetics.

2:44

Bill Oppenheim is here! Lol.

Speaking on The Myths we live by: Data we use and its limitations strategies for a chaotic universe.

Racing is a business without borders, a free market economy, and there is is a finish line. The best horse wins.

Both scientists and pedigree students want to replicate the successful patterns of good horses. That which has happened before is more likely to happen again. The question is exactly what is it thatl we're looking for.

Pitfalls:
Small sample size: early success leads to breeders following the hot cross, which later falls prey to the law of averages. Storm Bird/Secretariat mares. First 8 crops 36% SW, last 10 crops 2% SW. Overall actually just an average cross for the sire.

As soon as we know something works, it's outdated, because there's a 4 or 5 year lag between mating and result. Lines wax and wane in strength. It is a myth that once we discover a great cross all we have to do is continue to do it. The greater the numbers the less the success.

Bill doesn't much care for the nicking companies, he makes it pretty clear. As usual, the problem is with numbers and quality. There are too often not enough cases to reliably predict anything. Bill is much more interested in accurately identifying success.

1:40 p.m.

Skipped over Bill Oppenheim to go next with Sid Fernando on adding stamina to the Thoroughbred.

Stamina in this country is analogous to low "good cholesterol"....Got to pay attention or we'll have a heart attack.

Early 1970s--2 G1 equivalents at 1 3/4 miles or more. No G1 races at 6 furlongs. We gave more weight to distance and less to speed. Today 20 G1 6-7 furlong races for 3yos and up. None over 1 1/2 miles. Europe and Japan have continued on a path in racing and bloodlines where stamina has remained importance.

1:00 p.m.

Steve Tamariello of Performance Genetics is next.

Discarded the test he promoted last year and now focusing on performance tests through linkage disequilibirum....which is non-random association of alleles at two or morel loci, not necessarily on the same chromosome. Wants to identify genetic variants associated with speed, using linkage disequilibrium (?).

American horses have a distinct phenotype for dirt track races. Chose peak Beyer speed as their measure of racing ability. Separated population into 2 stringent categories.
Grade 1 winning 108 or higher, but no G3 or Listed SW, or allowance horses. non-Elites =78 or lower Beyer speed, generally similar quality sires and dams.

Sample size=60.....Again sample size. But then later says 365 horses without reconciling the two numbers. Who knows.

Found associations to elite performance on ten different chromosomes....more than other researchers have found.

Most interesting thing Tamariello shows is that according to their performance test, Mineshaft and Pretty Discreet both test as route runners, Mineshaft elite, Pretty Discreet not so much, but their son Discreetly Mine tests as a G1 sprinter, which is exactly what he was.

11:12 a.m.

That was fun. Emmeline basically stonewalled Lambert's question (see below for her answer). The controversy between Lambert/Binns and Hill comes basically from the fact that Hill makes bigger claims for the power of her tests than other geneticists do, and they do not take that lightly. And since in the modern world whoever yells loudest gets the most attention, it turns out to be quite important commercially.

Stephen Harrison up next.

Contrary to popular belief, the Thoroughbred is quite outbred compared to many other breeds. It's a probability model, and the more tests you have the better predictor you have.

Harrison's specialty has been Mitochondria, so he dives right in on that.

Original 2006 study found 13 different functional MtDNA genes. Looked at variations in stamina levels, quality, interaction with stallion mtDNA, etc. 33 different mtDNA types in Thoroughbred.

Some evidence of positive interactions between stallions and particular mtDNA types in mares. Invincible Spirit and Fusaichi Pegasus, for example did better than expected with certain types. No mention of sample size however. Small study showed that best ratios of mtDNA to nuclear DNA was for mtDNA type to same mtDNA type between sire and dam.

Someone from Emmeline's school attacks Harrison's data about mtDNA from males mixing. Says it's very well established that mtDNA is very well established coming only from the female in mammals. Harrison tries to defend. This is basically over everybody else's head except for the scientists. Harrison doesn't really answer.

10:00 a.m.

Brief set of questions from audience. Emmeline Hill up next. This could get interesting.

Emmeline begins by saying only four genes have been definitely identified as associated with performance in Thoroughbreds. Naturally, all of those are from her studies as far as I can tell from the slide.

Begins with rehashing Myostatin and her so-called "speed gene". Not a test for class, but only for preferred distance. Still insists that her marker for Myostatin is more accurate than other markers, in contradiction to what Matthew Binns showed in his talk.

Largest change in the expression of the myostatin gene due to training is in the CC sprint type. In other words, CC horses respond more quickly and more precociously to training than CT or TT horses. That is an interesting finding, confirmation that CC is related to precocity. It makes sense that the sprint genotype would have a big influence on 2yo racing.

Moves on to PDK4 gene's association with performance. First found an association but could not replicate. Then looked for novel variants that might have some effect, but again couldn't replicate original findings. Hypothesized that different genes may be interacting with the myostatin gene. Found a strong association with the stamina type horses, so implies that PDK4 gene is important for longer distance exercise, but not shorter distances.

Elite performance test. You get stronger results from the CCs and TTs, but different genes associated with performance in the different types. This is related to why what used to be called fish and fowl matings generally don't work....Different genes are required for success at shorter and longer distances, and therefore and they don't work together that well.

Technology is not a silver bullet, but it will increase your chances of improving your strike rate.

Hill's Class 1 and Class II horses earned more money than they cost at sales. Class III and IV did not.

That's a good result, but the problem for Hill is that she only uses blood samples not hairs. Therefore her tests are useless as a way of cutting down your short list at a sale, because it takes two weeks to get a result. Cannot be done overnight like hair sample tests. That's the source of the contention between Hill and Binns over which test is more accurate.

Uh Oh. David Lambert of Genetic Edge challenge's Hill on the numbers in her sample size.

Hill responds that they are capturing genetic potential, management and environment are hugely important. Equinome has applied for an international patent on myostatin that includes other people's markers....that's going to be trouble. In response to numbers, she claims even in small sample size, the proof is strong. "of course the more samples you have the more power that you have, but what we're able to do is capture the genes having the greatest influence on performance."

9:00 a.m .
Matt Binns up next.

Matt will cover:
Genetic perspective on traditional pedigree methods; Characteristics of genetically complex traits;
Genetic Edge products---

Pedigree is a surrogate for genetics. The thoroughbred is a perfect playground for geneticists because of the 300 years of records.

Good illustration using Zenyatta's pedigree of how her 5x5 inbreeding to Nashua actually works genetically. The statistical chances of getting the same genes from both of her crosses of Nashua are actually very small.

Binns thinks nicking exists....Complementary positive genes being inherited, but it operates at a relatively low probability because of the basic facts of genetic inheritance.

There has been a slight increase in %inbreeding since the 1960s, according to comparative DNA genomes, but it's only slight. Reinforces Bailey's point about diversity.

Correlation between 8-generation coefficient of inbreeding from pedigree and what you get if you do it by DNA testing is very low. Surprising result. The problem is that there are a limited number of variants at sites in horses but they can come from different sources than what genetic theory says.

Presents new research that produced loci for white coat color markings in Thoroughbreds.

Now we're smoothly into the Genetic Edge pitch. The familiar ABCD scoring system. Data predicts that the performance panel can eliminate about 50% of individuals from short list and retain about 75% of the short list. Only 5% of Grade Ds are Graded SW.

10% of pop are As, Bs and Cs are 40% each. A's increase your chances of getting GSW 3 to 1.

Distance marker: If you want to win a G1 sprint, you'd better be homozygous for the distance marker (myostatin). About half the Kentucky Derby winners, though are also homozygous for the sprint distance marker.

Goes after Emmeline's claim that her test is more accurate, and effectively debunks it. The gloves are off this year folks.

Concludes that this is still fairly young science. This speaks to one of the big problems with acceptance and use of genetic tests. Everybody wants to wait five years until they can see the results of predictive studies.

8:50 a.m.

Now Dr. Ernie Bailey is applying what Jamie said to horses.

Gus emphasizes that contrary to popular belief, there is still a lot of genetic diversity to exploit in Thoroughbreds. Thoroughbreds are genetically less diverse than other horses because of 300 years of selection for speed, soundness and stamina, but they are far more diverse than other species that might look more diverse like dogs.

I'll be live-blogging periodically from the second annual Pedigree and Genetics symposium at the Griffin Gate Hotel in Lexington today.

The first two speakers are covering basic genetics, so there's not that much of interest there, but then the fun should start with Matthew Binns of the Genetic Edge, so check back later.

American exceptionalism

2011-07-08T16:45:00.001-05:00

The following article was first published in Thoroughbred Times Today on July 1, 2011.

According to the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities (IFHA), the best racehorse on the planet right now is either the brilliant, unbeaten Australian sprinter Black Caviar or the brilliant, unbeaten English miler Frankel. And who might be the IFHA and why should we care what their rankings are, you ask?

As its name implies, the IFHA is an international organization comprised of racing organizations from more than 60 countries, including the American Jockey Club and the NTRA, that seeks to coordinate and harmonize racing rules and practices around the racing world. And we should pay attention to their rankings because the rest of the world does.

The IFHA has evolved from the organization founded by Jean Romanet and Marcel Boussac, who hosted the first international meeting among the racing authorities of France, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States at the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe meeting in 1961. By 1967 the first International Conference of Horseracing Authorities, also hosted in Paris by the Societe d'Encouragement (then the French racing authority headed by Romanet), attended by representatives from nine countries, including the original four. Representation expanded to 110 delegates from 50 countries by 1993, and the name of the organization was changed to the current title in 1994. The International Stud Book Committee, the International Cataloging Standards Committee, and the Society of International Thoroughbred Auctioneers all operate in association with the IFHA.

The World Thoroughbred Rankings list originated as the International Classification of the best horses in Great Britain, France, and Ireland in 1977. North American trained horses were first included in the rankings in '95, and Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand were added in '97 and '98. The annual rankings now include more than 650 horses worldwide, all ranked on a scale derived from the original European handicapping system, a scale of weights similar to historic American “free handicap” weights, but with a higher range of weights. Horses are given separate ratings for dirt, synthetic, and turf performances, and they are weighted according to their best performance in a single race, not overall form.

Very few American-trained horses were included in the early years, but the inauguration of the Dubai World Cup (UAE-G1) and the expansion of international races around the world, including the Breeders' Cup meeting, has given international handicappers a better handle on American form. In most recent years, their opinion has not been flattering to American racing.

World Thoroughbred Rankings cover a rotating six-month period and are issued about every two months. The most current rating list on the IFHA website (http://www.horseracingintfed.com/resources/2011Rankings/2011_0526_WTR.asp) covers the period from December 1, 2010 through May 23, 2011. The first 12 horses listed, at weights ranging from 130 to 122 pounds are trained in Australia, England, Ireland, Italy, Singapore, South Africa, and France. Animal Kingdom and Shackleford are the joint highest rated American-trained horses at 121 pounds, and only six other American-trained horses—Big Drama, Gio Ponti, Astrology, Jeranimo, Sidney's Candy, and Twirling Candy—appear among the 53 horses currently rated.

As in the larger world of international affairs American racing aficionados have become accustomed to believing that American horses are the best in the world. For the 30 years from about 1968 to 1997 or thereabouts, that was, on average almost certainly true. For at least the last decade, though, as demonstrated by international race meets like the Dubai Carnival and the Breeders' Cup, it is glaringly obvious that American-trained horses are superior to the rest of the world only on dirt.

Among the 60-plus member countries of the IFHA, however, only a few South American countries like Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay race predominantly on dirt. In North America in 2010, 76% of the races were on dirt, accounting for 63% of available purse money. Great Britain, Ireland Italy, Australia, Japan, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Singapore, all with horses rated higher than any American horse on the current ratings, all race exclusively or predominantly on turf.

American exceptionalism, the idea that America is qualitatively different—in so many words, better—than other countries, may or may not still be a viable concept in political circles. In the context of Thoroughbred racing, however, the rest of the world has clearly decided that it is an outdated belief.

The sooner we recognize that and act to change negative perceptions of American racing created by race-day medication and other factors, the sooner we can begin to reimpose American exceptionalism. And the sooner we can sell more horses to them at better prices.

Compete or die

2011-06-27T18:07:00.001-05:00

I did not attend the International Summit on Race Day Medication, EIPH, and the Racehorse held on June 13-14 at Belmont Park. Therefore I cannot speak from first-hand knowledge of everything that transpired over those two days among the reported 72 conferees, but I am sad to say that press reports so far leave me somewhat less than inspired and hopeful.

The principal achievement of the summit was....wait for it....to agree to have another meeting. As Peggy Lee sang too long ago for younger readers to remember, “is that all there is?”

Eric Wing, the NTRA's media director said, “No specific recommendations were announced but areas of broad interest were identified.” Perhaps I am being too cynical, but to me that means exactly the same thing it means when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she had “frank discussions” with her foreign counterparts—nobody could agree on anything. That is what happens when you get parties in a room with diametrically opposed agendas and self interests.

The principal problem American racing faces is finding a way to phase out race-day furosemide (Lasix or Salix). Trainers and veterinarians tend strongly to be on one side of the issue—in favor of race-day Lasix—and racing's administrators, owners, breeders, and international observers tend to be on the other.

One issue that was at least brought out into the open for the first time was the definition of “bleeding”. Prior to the 1970s and '80s, before the big push from trainers and veterinarians to legalize furosemide, a bleeder was a horse who visibly bled from the nostrils after a race or workout. That in fact was pretty much the universal definition of the malady in use at least since the days of the line-founding stallion Herod, born in 1758.

Advocates of race-day furosemide use, though, managed to conflate the term bleeder with exercise induced pulmonary hemorrhage (EIPH), a condition that is common in human athletes, greyhounds, and racing camels as well as equines. EIPH, essentially means the presence of blood, even tiny flecks, in the airway as a result of exercise. In horses, EIPH occurs in a significant percentage of horses after mild canters. That means, by the way, that some horses cantering and playing in their paddocks would likely incur EIPH. And, no, I am not trying to minimize the humane significance of EIPH, just stating facts.

Racing jurisdictions abroad, however, have never changed their definition of bleeding. Visible blood from the nostrils (epistaxis) is required for a horse to be defined as a bleeder. In some jurisdictions, such as Australia, observed epistaxis requires a lengthy ban from racing, and repeated episodes can lead to a permanent ban.

American trainers tend to assume that their situation—training at racetracks in large cities—is uniquely stressful on their horses. Have they ever been to Hong Kong? That city of seven million people is a match in terms of crowding, pollution, and other stressful factors for any American city. Race-day Lasix is not allowed in Hong Kong, and their horses have started to win races all over the world.

American horses do not win nearly as many races all over the world as they once did. That is no doubt partly because we have sold many of our best potential stallions and broodmares abroad for 30 years and the rest of the world has caught up, but that is not the only reason. If you understand genetics at all, it is not hard to understand that race-day medication is bound to increase dependence on such drugs over time.

American trainers and veterinarians need to understand that if they wish to have a business to run, horses to train and doctor ten or 20 years from now, they are going to have to adjust their viewpoint. American racehorse owners are not going to continue in a business the public increasingly sees as tainted by drugs. American breeders cannot continue indefinitely breeding horses that no one but vanishing American owners will buy.

Even if we agree that American conditions are different from foreign conditions—and they are—in the long run it does not matter. Globalization is here in Thoroughbred racing, and it has been here for about 15 years.

Our choice is either to retreat from the global village and die a long, painful death, or to embrace it and compete on even terms.

Ode to Epsom

2011-06-08T20:40:00.003-05:00

The following was first published in Thoroughbred Times Today on June 3, 2011.

Like many other classic races around the world, the Belmont Stakes was modeled on the Epsom Derby, which will be run for the 232^nd time tomorrow—if you count wartime Derbys that were run at Newmarket in 1915-18 and 1940-45.

More accurately known simply as the Derby Stakes, the true father of all classic races is the third oldest classic in the world. Both the St. Leger Stakes (G1), founded in 1776, and the Derby's companion race for fillies, the Epsom Oaks, inaugurated a year earlier than the Derby, are older. But the Derby has always been the most prestigious horse race in England, and that is why virtually every country around the world copied it as closely as local conditions allowed.

France came first, kicking off the Prix du Jockey-Club as the French equivalent of the Derby in 1836, and other countries followed almost as soon as their racing programs stabilized. In many cases it was the invention of local Derbys, as well as echoes of the other English classics, the Oaks, Two Thousand Guineas, One Thousand Guineas, and St. Leger, that formed the foundation for stabilizing those racing and breeding programs.

That was certainly the case in the United States. When racing resumed in New York at Jerome Park late in 1865 after the conclusion of the long and bloody Civil War, foundation of a race modeled after the Derby was one of the first orders of business for the wealthy bankers and industrialists intent on putting the horrors of the war well behind them. Leonard Jerome, though, went against tradition by naming his Derby equivalent the Belmont Stakes, after his primary financial backer, August Belmont I.

As American racing consolidated its shift from four-mile heat racing that had dominated prior to the War Between the States, other states soon followed suit, most notably Kentucky, which inaugurated its equivalent Derby in 1875. Over the years, the prestige of all these races waxed and waned with the times, and it was not until after World War I that the Kentucky race began to gain preeminence in America, and, in some senses, the world.

By that time the Kentucky Derby had been reduced from its original distance of 1 ½ miles to 1 ¼ miles, in deference to its position on the calendar a month before the Epsom classic. Meanwhile, the Belmont was raced at several distances over its first 60 years and did not settle at its current distance until 1926.

None of these global imitators, though, truly could match Epsom's unique conditions. The greatness of the Epsom Derby as the truest test of the Thoroughbred lies in the complex terrain of the racecourse itself. Myth has it that there is not one level square foot of ground on the wide, sweeping, horseshoe-shaped course. That is not quite true, but, as with most myths, there is truth in the thought.

The Derby course begins far across the chalky Surrey Downs from the grandstand, and climbs rather steeply uphill around a gentle right-handed curve for most of the first half-mile. As the course straightens out briefly at the top of the hill, the horses cross to the left hand rail and begin the steep descent around a left-handed curve to Tattenham Corner, 3 ½ furlongs from the finish. The course slopes downhill for another furlong or so before rising sharply again over the last furlong and a half.

It is a roller-coaster ride that tests a young three-year-old in more different ways than any other racecourse in the world. The horse must have the stamina to cope with a breakneck pace up that killing first half mile, the agility to turn right, turn left, and run uphill and down at racing pace. Then he must be able to accelerate in the last two furlongs on a course that doesn't just look to him by then as if it is tilting toward the inside rail. The natural camber of the land actually does slope from the outside toward the inner rail in addition to being uphill at that point. Thus countless tired horses have staggered toward the inside rail in Epsom's final furlong.

That is why the Derby remains the Derby. Non-stayers cannot win. Plodders without speed and acceleration cannot win. Horses who easily become unbalanced and lose their action cannot win.

Federico Tesio was right. The Thoroughbred is what it is because of a piece of wood—the finishing post at Epsom.

A feature not a bug

2011-06-02T16:42:00.000-05:00

Every year when Triple Crown season rolls around, complaints about the 1 1/2-mile distance of the Belmont Stakes (G1) resurface. Certain trainers in particular annually call for the distance to be shortened to 1 1/4 miles, and even go so far as to suggest shortening the Kentucky Derby (G1) to 1 1/8 miles so that the three Triple Crown races provide a steady progression of distances.

Fortunately that sentiment does not seem to have gained much traction, because, as software engineers are wont to say about perceived flaws in their products, the distance of the Belmont is a feature not a bug. Furthermore, in an all too insular industry that finally seems to be waking up to the negative way the rest of the world views our racing program, it is a feature that may well become a much stronger selling point in the future.

The Belmont is the oldest of the American classic races, inaugurated by Leonard Jerome in 1867, the year after the Wall Street speculator opened his eponymous racetrack in the north Bronx. Founder of the American Academy of Music and grandfather of Winston Churchill, Jerome designed the race as an American equivalent of the 1 1/2-mile Epsom Derby, and named it after banker August Belmont Sr., who financed construction of the track. Jerome Park's amenities were described as lavish, complete with an elegant ballroom and a clubhouse that rivaled the city's most luxurious hotels.

Jerome Park returned first-class horse racing to New York, following a hiatus during the Civil War. The Belmont was originally run at 1 5/8 miles, but fluctuated between 1 1/8 and 1 3/8 miles after it was moved to Morris Park in 1890 when Jerome Park was condemned by the city to facilitate the construction of the New Croton Aqueduct and Jerome Park Reservoir to provide water for the city.

The Belmont transferred to the new Belmont Park, built by August Belmont Sr.'s son August Belmont II, in 1904 and was run at 1 3/8 miles until 1926, when Samuel D. Riddle's Crusader, son of Belmont-bred Man o' War, became the first Belmont winner at the 1 1/2-mile distance that has since become sacrosanct.

In Crusader's era, there were scores of other prestigious American races at 1 1/2 miles and beyond, but as the emphasis in American racing shifted inexorably toward precocious speed after World War II, those races disappeared, were reduced in distance, or transformed into turf races one by one. Since the American Jockey Club, founded by August Belmont II and Leonard Jerome, among others, abandoned its historic principals in pursuit of perceived relevance for its namesake race, the Jockey Club Gold Cup (G1), and reduced its distance to 1 1/4 miles in 1990, the Belmont has stood alone as America's only 1 1/2-mile Grade 1 stakes on dirt.

That uniqueness makes the Belmont more valuable than ever to the American racing industry in the current global racing environment. As various supporters of the move to ban race-day medications have correctly pointed out, the rest of the world, particularly Europeans, see American racing as increasingly irrelevant, primarily because medications allow horses who otherwise might not be able to compete to win top-level races.

Distance is also a factor in those perceptions, however. The rest of the world still reveres horses that can beat the best at distances from the 1 1/2 miles of the Epsom Derby and most other Derby equivalents around the world to the two miles of Australia's greatest race, the Emirates Melbourne Cup (Aus-G1).

It is an exquisite bit of irony that an American-bred horse named Americain won the 2010 Melbourne Cup. His sire, Dynaformer, trained by one of the principal critics of the Belmont's distance, D. Wayne Lukas, won at 1 1/2 miles, and is one of only a very few American sires foreign buyers might expect to sire a major winner over that distance. Dynaformer's daughter, Blue Bunting, winner of the 2011 Qipco One Thousand Guineas (Eng-G1), is one of the favorites for the 1 1/2-mile Epsom Oaks (Eng-G1).

Dynaformer, though, is 26 years old. Who will succeed him as a potential sire of European Derby winners when he is gone? Why should Europeans come to America to buy potential Derby winners if we have no stallions capable of producing them?

So, the next time someone mocks the distance of the Belmont stakes or calls it a “marathon” (please!), tell them, no, it is a feature, not a bug.

Memories of Pimlico

2011-05-28T08:49:00.002-05:00

(First published in Thoroughbred Times Today on May 20, 2011)

I first visited Pimlico Race Course in the spring of 1969, while attending graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. Two weeks previously, Braulio Baeza on Arts and Letters had allowed Bill Hartack on Majestic Prince to get first run on him in the Kentucky Derby and beaten him a neck.

Arts and Letters was drawn outside Majestic Prince in the Preakness, so Baeza's and trainer Elliott Burch's plan for the Preakness was to stay lapped on him and not let Majestic Prince get away. That plan fell apart in the first strides when Al Hattab swerved into the *Ribot colt, knocking him further behind than in the Derby.

Arts and Letters again rallied determinedly in the stretch, but still fell a head short at the wire. The Rokeby Stable colt got his revenge three weeks later in the Belmont Stakes, and raced on undefeated through the rest of the year to earn Horse of the Year, but my first experience of the Preakness was not a happy one.

Pimlico in 1969 was a rather ramshackle old place. The historic Member's Clubhouse had burned three years previously and the Maryland Jockey Club was still two years away from remodeling the grandstand.

My third trip to the Preakness (I saw Personality win in 1970 as well) in 1995 was no better, if not worse. Minutes after pulling into the parking lot of the motel that Thoroughbred Times's Los Angeles-based travel agent had chosen, I was mugged at gunpoint before I could get my room door unlocked. Not a good way to begin Preakness week.

Three years later, things got even tougher when an overloaded electrical transformer at the track exploded, blacking out most of the grandstand, including the press box. I am all for exercise and physical fitness, but sprinting up and down four flights of stairs between races is not my idea of fun. Even before that potentially disastrous incident 13 years ago, many critics had pointed out that the ancient, dilapidated grandstand needed to be bulldozed and replaced. Cosmetics aside, not much has been done since.

I must admit, though, that my most recent (and quite possibly last) visit in 2005 to the rather disheveled old lady on Park Heights Avenue made up for some of the indignities Pimlico has visited upon me. Seeing Afleet Alex pick himself up off his knees at the top of the stretch and win the Preakness by seven lengths remains one of the most remarkable displays of agility, ability, and determination I have ever seen.

It is a short drive along Northern Parkway from the Hopkins campus in the Homewood area of Baltimore to Pimlico, but even in 1969 the two neighborhoods were worlds apart. Then as now, Homewood is stately, tree-sheltered homes for the upper-middle class; Pimlico is bordered by working-class apartment buildings and businesses. Kegasus is not really that out of place in the Pimlico neighborhood.

Like the rest of the world, Baltimore itself is a far different place in 2011 than it was in 1969. The Inner Harbor area, now home to museums, upscale shops, and the ESPN Zone was then known as “the Block”, an ominous euphemism for an area dominated by mob-owned strip joints and bars.

If the Block was not a place that a naïve farm boy from Tennessee was likely to visit, perhaps Pimlico was only slightly more probable for a kid who had not yet decided what to do with his life. Only a couple of hours away in Upperville, Virginia, though, was Rokeby Stud, Paul Mellon's idyllic estate where Arts and Letters and a host of other top racehorses had been born and raised.

If Pimlico was not quite charming and classy enough to lure a young, romantic idealist away from the halls of academe, Rokeby was. The dreams born of visits to Rokeby and Pimlico live on in the heart of this 64-year-old curmudgeon.

In the spring an old man's fancy still turns to Black-Eyed Susans. The old lady in Baltimore is in need of something much more than a face lift, but she is worth saving. If only we can find the will and the way to do it.

Drink up!

2011-05-14T14:53:00.003-05:00

It's been a long time between drinks here at the Pedigree Curmudgeon. Those of you who read Thoroughbred Times Today will be aware that my workload there increased from one column a week on a pedigree or auction to two every week, a pedigree (occasionally sale) column on Tuesday and a commentary piece on Friday.

What I have found is that I cover the subjects I used to write about on this blog (and more) in the Friday commentary. The increased workload also reduces my motivation to post here because I'm an old curmudgeon who's supposed to be mostly retired, and I only want to do so much of anything that resembles work. This may be fun sometimes, but it sure feels like work too.

At the same time I do not want to let this blog die. There may well be subjects I do not want to talk about in TT Today that I talk about here at some point. Or not....who knows?

In the meantime, I plan to post some of those Today pieces here, a day or two after they appear in Today. Let me know if you think this is a waste, or something worthwhile.

So here goes....my pedigree story on Animal Kingdom, winner of the 137th Kentucky Derby. And perhaps I'll have some follow up comments once I get the hang of this thing again.

(Previously published in the May 10 edition of Thoroughbred Times Today)

Turf pedigree comes up roses in the Derby

Animal Kingdom is bred for the turf but proves a superior runner on dirt

by John P. Sparkman

It would be difficult to write a more turf-oriented pedigree than that of 2011 Kentucky Derby (G1) winner Animal Kingdom. In the first three generations of his pedigree, only two horses, his sire Leroidesanimaux (Brz) and Bubble Company (Fr), dam of Leroidesanimaux's sire Candy Stripes, even ran on dirt, and neither won. And yet, in his first start on dirt, Animal Kingdom blew away the field in the final eighth of the Derby.

Only two horses in the fourth generation of Animal Kingdom's pedigree, his great-great grandsire Red God and Navajo Princess, dam of Dancing Brave, the sire of Animal Kingdom's second dam, won on dirt. That did not stop Animal Kingdom from winning the first jewel of the American Triple Crown on May 7.

Animal Kingdom is from the second crop of 2005 champion turf male Leroidesanimaux, whose defeat in the 2005 Breeders' Cup Mile (G1) by Artie Schiller ended an eight-race win streak that stretched over two racing seasons. Winner of one of three starts and placed in the Grande Premio Associacao Brasileira de Criadores e Proprietarios de Cavalo de Corrida (Brz-G1) in his native Brazil, he lost his first North American start, before sweeping all before him for the next eighteen months. That streak included wins in the 2004 Citation (G1), Inglewood (G3), and Morvich (G3) Handicaps, and the '05 Atto Mile (Can-G1), Frank E. Kilroe Mile Handicap (G1), and Fourstardave Handicap (G2).

A half-brother to Brazilian Group 1 winner Uapybo, by Blush Rambler, out of a half sister to the dams of leading French sire Dansili and Grade 1 or Group 1 winners Banks Hill (GB), Cacique (Ire), Champs Elysees (GB), Heat Haze (GB), Intercontinental (GB), and Promising Lead (GB), Leroidesanimaux retired to Richard and Audrey Haisfield's Stonewall Stud at a fee of $30,000 in 2006. A lengthy, handsome, correct horse very much in the mold of his line-founding grandsire Blushing Groom (Fr), Leroidesanimaux's stud career may have been hampered by the financial difficulties Stonewall encountered. Leroidesanimaux transferred to Stonewall's Ocala, Florida farm for the 2011 season, where he stands for a fee of $7,500.

Animal Kingdom is his third stakes winner and third graded winner from 140 foals age three and up, following multiple Grade 2 winner Always a Princess (out of Gabriellina Giof [GB], by Ashkalani) and Grade 3 winner Leroy's Dynameaux (Dyna Peak, by Dynaformer).

Animal Kingdom is the first foal of his dam, Dalicia (Ger), by the great German racehorse and sire Acatenango, a mare whose pedigree is German or Hungarian for nine generations. Bred in Germany by Carlton Consultants Ltd., Dalicia won only three of 21 starts, but one of those three wins came in the 2005 Preis der Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe (Ger-G3), where she beat multiple Group 1 winner Soldier Hollow by two lengths over 2,000 meters (9.96 furlongs). Imported to America by Team Valor and the Haisfields's Nevertell Racing Stable, Dalicia won one of five starts, a ten-furlong optional claimer over Santa Anita's turf course.

Dalicia is a full sister to Darwinia, dam of Daveron (Ger), by Black Sam Bellamy, winner of the Beaugay Stakes (G3) at Belmont Park on Derby day. Dalicia's dam Dynamis, by Dancing Brave, is half sister to Henckel Rennen (Ger-G2) (German One Thousand Guineas) winner Diacada, by Cadeaux Genereux), German highweight Desidera, by Shaadi, and stakes winner Diable, by Big Shuffle, from a family that has been producing top Central European stakes winners for 100 years.

Animal Kingdom is inbred 4x4 to Lyphard, with an inbreeding coefficient of 0.88%. Although his pedigree is basically an outcross, he is, in theory, inbred for ability on the turf.

That did not slow him down in the 2011 Kentucky Derby.

Travel is broadening

2011-01-22T10:37:00.003-06:00

Travel to foreign lands is supposed to be broadening. Exposure to the way other countries, other cultures do things can give one new perspectives on our own habits and unconscious assumptions.

In the contemporary world, though, travel can also be sickening. It would be unfair to blame American Airlines and the whole US air travel system for the horrible head and chest cold I developed a few days after a Boschean trip back from my rather wonderful visit to Uruguay, but what the hell? It surely wasn't my fault that what should have been a 14-hour trip turned into a 36 hour ordeal.

Nine hours in the air from Montevideo trapped in the middle seat of a row is bad enough, but when the plane could not land in Miami because of fog and was diverted to Orlando, it turned a bearable experience into a visit to one of the inner rings of Dante's Inferno. U.S. customs will not allow even U.S. citizens to enter a different port than the one designated, so we had to sit on the tarmac in Orlando for 3 hours (breaking all kinds of FAA rules, of course), return to Miami once that airport opened, and then face the sheer, chaotic hell of trying to re-book flights at the same time half a dozen other similarly delayed flights were doing the same. When I noticed while standing in line that American had exactly one person working on re-booking a line that already numbered more than 100 and would grow to at least 500 or so, I decided it was time to punt. I took a room in a hotel, booked a flight for the next morning from there, and called it a day.

Some of my impressions of Uruguay and the broader insights from my trip are included in the link at right titled Uruguay postcards, which will take you to a PDF compilation of my daily reports from Montevideo and other sites, if you did not already see those ruminations when originally published in Thoroughbred Times Today. (I've also added links to my recent Bloodstock Topics articles in the Thoroughbred Times print edition on the production records of Great racemares and Hall of Fame male racehorses, if you didn't see those.)

The wonderful folks in Uruguay invited me down because they were interested in a) the publicity I could offer their racing and breeding program, and b) my observations on what they might be able to do better. As you'll see in the postcards, I was more than happy to do both.

Uruguay is a small, vibrant, mostly rural country with a very different problem set than our own. Even in Montevideo, a sprawling city of 1.3-million people, the people still feel a connection to the land that our city dwellers lost long ago. They know where their meat and vegetables come from, unlike some of our city school children who think they come from Kroger or Wal-Mart.

The Gaucho heritage is still much more alive than America's frontier cowboy myth, which has mostly disappeared from the public consciousness. Outside Montevideo, the country feels vast and empty, with herds of cattle grazing over endless, rolling fields. Uruguayans still know what a horse is and what it means to their lives. Americans, as a rule, do not.

What Uruguay does not have as a racing country is a large number of very wealthy individuals who are interested in horse racing and willing to invest the large sums necessary to make the country a real player on the world stage. With a population of only about 3.5-million, 1% of that of the United States, there simply is no critical mass of investment to make the breeding industry take off. Barring Uruguay's version of Sheikh Mohammed injecting serious capital, it is hard to see much change in the near future.

Uruguay does have a world-class racecourse in Hipodromo Nacional de Maronas. The physical plant's lovely 19th century style has been beautifully, stylishly updated by Hipica Rioplatense and the racecourse itself is beautifully laid out, with a demanding home straightaway of almost three furlongs. It is a long way from that final turn to the finish line, a distance that requires both courage and stamina to win a race.

Despite the arduous and stressful trip home, I would do it all again. The people are warm and engaging, working hard to make their world as a whole better. Sadly, that is not always the feeling one gets from within the American racing industry where turf wars remain all too common.

Travel is broadening.

Rio de la Plata

2011-01-06T09:17:00.005-06:00

We are not scheduled to go to Hipodromo Nacional de Maronas until 3:00 pm today, so I decided to walk down to the beach this morning and dip my toe into the Rio de la Plata. The beach I wanted to walk to turned out to be a good bit further than I thought--distances perceived when you're being driven along in a car can be deceiving. But I found a place where I could wade out over slippery rocks to sit on a rock and let the muddy waters lap over me.

The Rio de la Plata is an estuary formed by the confluence of the Parana and Uruguay rivers which join just north west of Buenos Aires. Those two rivers drain most of Southern Brazil, Paraguay, Northern Argentina and part of Bolivia, so the waters are full of silt. A shoal called the Barrio del Indio near Montevideo means that this is about as far as the muddy water normally extends before sinking under the sea water. Yesterday the water was blue at Montevideo; today it is brown.

January 6 is a national holiday in Uruguay known as Three Kings Day after the biblical story. Because the three kings brought gifts, kids get gifts just like Christmas. Must be nice to have two Christmases within two weeks of each other. I had thought about exploring the Ciudad Vieja this morning but after a very late night last night the fact that many shops would be closed made it too tempting to stay closer to the hotel.

The pre-race cocktail party last night was similar to a Breeders' Cup or Triple Crown race media party, though, of course, smaller. The Breeders' Cup has never matched the setting of the Maronas party though, since it was in a restaurant/bar on a point about five miles east of Montevideo. The spit of land sticks far enough out into the Rio de la Plata that the lights of Montevideo were spread out like a string of stars on the night sky.

The river is 60 miles wide here at Montevideo and beyond stretches the deep blue sea.

Such grandeur gives one perspective.

Let's go racing!

Horse of the Year or Horse of the Decade

2010-12-07T15:47:00.005-06:00

Is Zenyatta the Horse of the Year, the Horse of the Decade? Or both?

To this observer that is the only remaining question in the ongoing debate between Blame and Zenyatta proponents for 2010 Horse of the Year. Think about it....no, seriously. Project yourself, say 10 years into the future, and ask yourself who will be remembered as Horse of the Decade for the first ten years of the 2000s.

I'm certain there are readers who will disagree, but I cannot see how it can be any horse but Zenyatta for Horse of the Decade. She will be the only significant horse to lose only one race, the only winner of 19 straight, the only mythic equine figure of the decade, the only horse the public remembers from the "naughty noughts".

The other possible candidates? Maybe Tiznow, who did become a two-time Breeders' Cup Classic winner in the first year of the decade. Curlin was Horse of the Year twice, but tailed off rather markedly after his return from Dubai. Ghostzapper made the speed boys shiver but did not race very often, and his apparent belly flop at stud will hurt him in the past's rear-view mirror, justified or not. How can any of that compare to winning the first 19 of 20 starts and the mythic status that streak acquired? What other American-based horse really did much worth remembering for more than one season? What other horse evoked comparisons to the all-time greats of the sport?

I'm sure I'm missing someone and you readers will remind me, but I can't come up with any other really deserving candidates. The classic 3-year-olds all flubbed their lines at one time or the other. Rachel Alexandra was brilliant for one season against a bad crop of 3-year-old colts and an almost non-existent older male division. The American grass horses have become a joke. Azeri also won three consecutive older mare titles, but no one except possibly Michael Paulson really thinks she should be compared to Ruffian.

So how can a horse clearly be the Horse of the Decade and not be voted Horse of the Year even one of those years? Well, it could happen. The speed figure believers have never liked her, the anti-synthetic crowd doesn't like her (despite the fact that she ran probably her three best races in her only starts on dirt), and there is still a strong Eastern bias to the voting base. I suspect, though, that the strongest opposition comes from the folks who are saying the award should go to the horse who won the biggest race of the year against the best field of the year. Of course, many of those are the same folks who voted for Rachel Alexandra last year, ignoring the obvious fact that it was Zenyatta who won the biggest race against the best field last year. Go figure.

Intelligent, honorable people can certainly disagree, and I cast no aspersions on anyone else's opinion. But for me, Zenyatta cannot be Horse of the Decade and not be Horse of the Year. She's earned it.

Dr. Binns and Mr. Morris

2010-10-22T13:29:00.006-05:00

Just finished reading Matt Binns's and Tony Morris's Thoroughbbred Breeding: Pedigree theories and the science of genetics, and for all my friends who asked, yes, it is worth the time and money. (You can order it at http://www.amazon.com/Thoroughbred-Breeding-Pedigree-Theories-Genetics/dp/0851319351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1287774548&sr=8-1)

The first half of the book is Tony's and serves as a brief history of the development of the Thoroughbred and the concomitant development of documentation and commentary on the breed. I've tried to cover some of this same ground in various articles and, to a lesser extent, my book Foundation Mares, but Tony has a better library and better sources available and does a much better job than I ever could. Tony has never had much time for pedigree theories that are not backed by science--appropriately so--so his dismissal of such things as Bruce Lowe and dosage are no surprise.

One of the surprising revelations of Tony's exposition, though is how little development there was--at least in print--of anything that could reasonably be called a breeding theory before the appearance of the work of Bruce Lowe in Australia and England (via William Allison) and Hermann Goos and J.P. Frentzel in Germany in the 1890s. It certainly appears that Allison was really the first commentator to push a particular mating method in print (Lowe's crackpot theories) and, since he was a bloodstock agent, doubtless advise breeders on matings (He was also part owner of a stud). Parenthetically, Allison was the man who helped choose the English broodmares bought as the basis for the studs of seminal American breeders James R. Keene, August Belmont II and Samuel D. Riddle/Walter Jeffords. It is pretty clear, however, from looking at Keene's pedigrees that his manager/brother-in-law Maj. Foxhall Daingerfield, paid no attention to Allison's/Lowe's breeding theories. Furthermore, the success of Belmont and Riddle/Jeffords was dependent almost entirely on Fair Play and his son Man o' War.

The most interesting bit of new knowledge for me in Tony's chapters is the fact that research on coat color through the pages of the General Stud Book actually played an important role in the early 1900s in verifying and popularizing Mendel's work.

Tony's repeated theme, though, is that, up until very recently indeed, none of the theories promoted to aid breeders in producing better racehorses had any real scientific basis, and precious few even attempted to establish some kind of statistical validity.

Professor Binns, a molecular biologist by training who has since started his own equine genetic testing service in partnership with David Lambert, DVM, takes over for the second half of the book. Necessarily, he begins by covering the much-trod ground of basic Mendelian genetics, but his chapters get much more interesting when he moves on to more complex variations on the basic Mendelian themes.

Matt is actually quite gentle in deconstructing theories such as the X-factor and the broodmare sire effect. In addition to pointing out that there is no basis in current scientific knowledge for such simplistic theories, he allows the possibility that future research might salvage some vestige of those and other ideas. That's what a true scientist does--lay out what is known about a subject and point out the probable verdict on a current theory, according to that research, but acknowledge that not enough is known to say precisely what the truth might be (unless, of course, there is sufficient knowledge!).

Matt's half of the book raises several questions in my mind that I plan to discuss with him, once I've followed those loose ends as far as my limited knowledge allows, but I learned a lot from his chapters, and was reminded of other bits of genetic fact that had slipped away over the years.

Matt's half does suffer somewhat from what has become the bane of the equine author--the almost two-year gap between the time he finished writing and the actual appearance of the book in the shop window. (The same thing happened with the publication of Foundation Mares.) On the last page of the book, obviously at the last possible second before publication, he inserted a brief reference to Emmeline Hill, et.al.'s publication of their work on the Myostatin gene related to distance preferences in racehorses. Much else, including Matt's own research and the launching of his testing service, has happened in equine genetics since he wrote his chapters. There are now at least five different companies offering genetic tests of various descriptions, and other than the reference to Hill's paper, none of that appears in Thoroughbred Breeding: Pedigree theories and the science of genetics.

I know that many pedigree pundits and advisors have been anxious that Tony's and Matt's book would be essentially a dismissal of all pedigree theories and research except genetics. Though some may read it that way, that clearly is not the purpose. Matt in particular clearly sees his science as an adjunct to knowledge of pedigree and conformation, not a replacement.

Read it for yourself and let me know what you think.

Best ever racemares

2010-10-19T15:36:00.004-05:00

Frank Mitchell has started an interesting debate over on his Bloodstock in the Bluegrass blog at http://fmitchell07.wordpress.com/ by asking his readers who were the greatest racemares of the last 100 years. Naturally most of the responses suffer from the recency effect. Only curmudgeons seem to remember, or be very much interested in, the achievements of what to others is the distant past.

It's an interesting question, though, worth some thought, and a quick look back through the records to remind even this old head of the glories of the past. In truth though, it is almost certainly entirely just to discount the achievements of virtually all of the fillies and mares that raced before World War II. American racehorses were quite simply better after the importation of European stallions and mares reached critical mass in the aftermath of the war. It seems pretty clear that the American racehorse reached something of an apotheosis in the 1960s and '70s, and everything since then must be compared to those horses. The fact that those decades happen to coincide with this old curmudgeon's impressionable teens and 20s has absolutely nothing to do with it.

So what does your list look like? Here's mine, with some semi-credible attempts at justification.

1. Ruffian....Ran too fast too many times not to be at or near the top.

2. Zenyatta....19 for 19....What else is there to say? (Yeah I know, there are plenty who quibble)

3. Dark Mirage...800 pound monster won 10 straight @3 and 4, many by huge margins

4. Gallant Bloom....Beat Shuvee 5 out of 6, 11 straight wins, vastly underrated even in her era

5. Allez France...Raced only once in U.S. when past her best, but beat Dahlia 5 for 5, beat colts 8 times in Europe

6. Personal Ensign...13 for 13, but had to be carefully handled because of soundness and thus difficult to evaluate fairly

7. Dahlia....only 15 for 48, but raced on when well past her best...Beat top colts silly in Europe 5 times, and 4 times in America.

8. Desert Vixen....9 for 11 at 3 in '73...admittedly a sentimental favorite. Led Dahlia a merry chase in D.C. International over distance way too far and almost held on. Great filly.

9. Rachel Alexandra....Sorry folks, generally overrated. Beat a bad bunch of colts, just like any of the fillies rated above her here would have.

10. Tosmah...17 for 22 at 2 and 3, beat colts in Arlington Classic

11. (why stop at 10?) Go for Wand...Another sentimental choice, but 10 for 12 before dying on the lead is pretty damned good.

12. Shuvee...Couldn't beat Gallant Bloom, but beat everything else after GB retired.

13. Bayakoa...16 for 21 and absolutely lethal at 5 and 6 when at her best.

That's my lucky 13. Have at it.

Natural beauty

2010-10-15T16:24:00.005-05:00

Nature, in her carefree way, has cast aside her most colorful autumnal cloak over the hills of north central Tennessee and south central Kentucky. That made the drive north from my haven on the banks of the Caney Fork to Lexington last Sunday for the Pedigree and Genetics Symposium on Monday more pleasurable than usual.

I prefer to drive early in the morning, so a gorgeous Sunday afternoon was free for first looks at some new stallions.

Desert Party is the standout on conformation among the three young horses I saw at Darley. He has grown into exactly the perfectly balanced, handsome, miler type one would have hoped when he topped the Fasig-Tipton Calder sale three years ago. There were times during his 10-6-1-0 racing career when the Street Cry colt looked like a G1 caliber horse, but he never stayed good enough or sound enough long enough to prove it. But he looks the part.

Street Boss looks exactly like what he was, a high-class sprinter. He's more heavily muscled than Desert Party, which he should be, and, aside from his chestnut coat, looks more like his sire. Thankfully he's more correct than Street Cry, but most of his sire's good ones are, of course. That's the way it works.

Midshipman is still in the process of letting down. He's a big, attractive horse, with the size and shoulder that Unbridled's Song passes on so consistently, but also managed only the brief racing career that has become all too frequent with sons of his sire. I loved Unbridled's Song from the time I saw him stroll from his stall in the Derry Meeting barn at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale, but too many of his good offspring do not last past the spring of their three-year-old year. Midshipman might be a little light boned for his size, but otherwise has no obvious flaws. He just needs to fill out into a stallion.

From Darley I motored down to Nicholasville to Taylor Made.

I had discovered I didn't have a good picture of Unbridled's Song, so I snapped him, as well as his son Old Fashioned. The latter is probably the best-looking son of Unbridled's Song I've seen. Pretty correct, luckily not as big as his sire, and beautifully balanced. He was better than I expected. Old Fashioned raced even fewer times than Midshipman, but he is pretty clearly a Grade 1 talent for a Grade 2 price.

Eskendereya has a similar 6-4-1-0 record to Old Fashioned, and has a terrific body. Big shoulder, long barrel, nice long hip, but he's nowhere near as correct. He's offset and rotates both front legs, and it's easy to see why he had tendon problems. He's a very attractive horse, but you'd have to be careful what you breed to him.

Which, come to think of it, is true for just about any stallion you look at.

Afternoon session Pedigree and Genetics Symposium

2010-10-11T12:11:00.012-05:00

2:50 pm

Matthew Binns will finish off the presentations

Begins by saying pedigree is genetics. Matthew theme is going to be very similar to his recent book with Tony Morris, which attempts to debunk most pedigree theories.

Matthew veered more toward his own research that the Genetic Edge sells...here's a brief summary:

Whole genome study looked at racing performance, distance, surface and height. Developed a scoring system of grades ABCD for racing performance and established the incidence of the grades at sales. Markers include a female-specific SNP. They also found a marker that is specific to Mr. Prospector horses, a SNP that's only present in the good Mr. P horses, and not in the non elite horses.

Data predicts that you can eliminate 50% of individuals on a short list at sales and retain 75% of the GSWs. Blind test found the 6 GSWs hidden among 55 moderate horses. Population is10% As, 40% Bs 40% Cs 10% Ds

Tested 27 G1 sprinters and all were homozygous for sprint genotype. But several horses who won the Kentucky Derby were homozygous sprinters. Race pace is crucial in American racing.

There are multiple SNPs strongly associated with different surfaces, some associated with muscle enzymes.

Matthew ends with perhaps the most appropriate comment of the day:

This is real and it's coming, and we hope that you will embrace it.

1:50 pm

Emmeline Hill of Equinome up next.

Heritability of racing ability is somewhere between 35% and 55%, but heritability of best racing distance is much more heritable, according to an Australian study, about 94%.

Myostatin is a negative regulator of muscle mass....it controls the development of muscles. Mutation in myostatin leads to massive muscling. Knowledge of that fact led to looking for polymorphisms in the horse myostatin gene. Found a polymorphism represented by the base pairs C and T. Found no differences in class of horses carrying the three possible combinations (CT, CC, TT), but differences in best winning distance were found.

Basically Emmeline is going over her original study that was published in January.

Almost all quarter horses are CCs, almost all Egyptian Arabians are TTs. Thoroughbreds, elite graded stakes winning horses, show what you would expect, more CTs than anything else, your basic normal distribution, slightly skewed in favor of CCs. National hunt (steeplechase) winners on the other hand are heavily skewed toward TTs, but no CCs at all.

New Equinome research published today, new study indicates that the myostatin gene is the most powerful indicator of best race distance. Says Equinome's marker performs 15 times better than any other marker in predicting best racing distance.

What genes are responding to exercise. Certain genes activity are significantly enhanced after exercise. The response increases over time as a result of training. It prepares the system to be able to be better able to respond to exercise.

Over 5k genes present in skeletal muscle. After year of training 16 genes increased activity and 58 decreased, The gene that changed the most was myostatin. Decreased its activity over 4 times.

1:10 pm

Bob Fierro of Datatrack International up next. Bob is threatening to use me as an illustration of one of his points. I dread to think what it might be. Should I run? Knowing Bob, yes.

I got to be Alydar (a long legged stride horse), Jay Kilgore was Danzig (power), Alan Porter (light weight long distance runner), and Byron Rogers (the balanced athlete, in his case a triathlete). Who knew.

Bob shows that the distribution of phenotypes of classic winners and leading sires has changed drastically since 1970s. Breed has gotten larger, lighter, more powerful, and not as balanced as they used to be and much less consistent. 2000s starting to be a little more consistent.

Secretariat turns out to be a critical horse in terms of biomechanics....His phenotype helps pull the breed back toward balance, through horses like A.P. Indy, Storm Cat, and Gone West.

Live blogging the Pedigree and Genetics Symposium

2010-10-11T07:13:00.018-05:00

Lunch Break....I'll start a new blog entry for the afternoon.

11:40 a.m.

Tamariello discusses epistasis and epigenetics, both of which complicate the simple DNA approach. Just because you have a particular gene, it doesn't necessarily drive the phenotype. The control of the expression of genes into proteins that actually govern the body. Just by looking at the gene sequence alone, you can't predict everything.

Tamariello's company screens for:

Two muscle-related genes

Two behavior genes

Two bone development genes and

One energy-related gene

plus Whole genome screening and other higher-level screening.

11:20 a.m.

Tamariello is going over basic genetic biology that everybody in the crowd should already know. Apologetic for perhaps talking down to the audience, but still that's what he's doing. Good refresher course for those too far removed from Biology 101 I suppose.

Once through with the basics, he moves on to more specific stuff related to the Thoroughbred.

Muscle Gene 1, a gene linked to muscle function. Two alleles, racing and non-racing. Thoroughbred breeders have bred over centuries to have 2 copies of the racing allele, but there is a sub-population that is not homozygous. Heterozygous can be successful, but homozygous recessive (non-racing) are too slow to even make it to the track. This is the genotype found in most draft horses. Having 2 copies of the racing alleles, however, does not make it a fast horse.

11:00 a.m.

Prof. Steve Tamariello up next, hopefully will relate Jamie MacLeod's work more directly to the Thoroughbreds.

10:40 a.m.

Jamie's final comments may ease the worries of certain individuals in the industry:

"Equine genomics will enhance and enable good horsemanship, not compete with it Genomics in no way threatens the importance and artistry of horsemanship."

10:30 a.m.

Jamie gave a detailed explanation of how SNPs (Single Nucelotide Polymorphisms) work, which is much too complicated to try to explain on the fly. Look it up. But here's a summary of how they're used.

"What we're tyring to do is localize what region in the genome has an association with the trait you're studying. We know where in the genome where each SNP is located, know the frequency of each allele in the population. Then we compare the frequency of alleles in the population as a whole to the population with the trait you're studying.

When you find differences, that shows theres' something of interest on that particular chromosome at that particular position. Then look back at the genome map and see what genes are in that region.

10:00 a.m.

Dr. Jamie MacLeod of UK and the Gluck up next on the Equine Genome project. His brief is to give context and background for the geneticists coming up later.

Highlights of the development of the current technology for genetic research include:

The horse was added to the USDA Animal Genome Mapping project in 1996. The Human Genome project extended from 1990—2003. That gave all of animal sciences a blueprint for the genome but also provided new technology for the sequencing of other genomes, including the horse.

NIH decided they could learn additional information by sequincing the genomes of other species to compare the human genome to that of other species. The horse community convinced the NIH to select the horse to sequence among equids, because of the community of scientists working on horse genetics, there were already several well-developed genome maps; there are many biomedical aspects of horse that relate to human health, for example at the elite athlete level; veterinary medical applications; and the existence of deep pedigrees to study the inheritance of traits.

The proposal was submited to NHGRI in 2005. Sent samples to the Broad Institute in November 2005. NIH looked for a highly inbred horse, because of the way DNA is sequenced. With a highly inbred individual, the two halves are more similar, so easier for the computer program to put it together. A Thoroughbred mare named Twilight was chosen. Sequencing started in 2006 and completed fall 2007.

9:40 a.m.

Alan concludes with a look forward:

"We're anticipating that genetic research will reinforce and validate much of the analysis that we see in Thoroughbred pedigrees."

"Relying solely on pedigree is foolhardy, but likewise so is dismissal of pedigree as unimportant. Pedigree will continue to be an important eliminating criteria.Maybe 5-10 years away we're going to see a change in what pedigree actually means. What we're seeing with genetics is that though a mare might be an Easy Goer mare, she has very little of Easy Goer's good genes. Genetics can tell us what has actually been passed on instead of just a theoretical assumption and we might breed two mares by the same sire entirely differently."

Question time!

9:30 a.m.

Alan is basically attempting to cover both the historical background of Thoroughbred research and provide a frame for the other speakers later in the day. Very appropriate way to begin the symposium.

In relating his own personal history, Alan had the good grace to acknowledge the contributions of his late rival Jack Werk, though he noted that they had "philosophical differences." That was something of an understatement!

The heart of his talk can be summed up by this approximate quote (hey I can only type so fast!):

"In terms of pedigree research in my time in the industry we've gone from split pedigree books and doing everything by hand to computer programs that access every horse in the population. Now everybody can have access to the data. What is now important is how to interpret the data."

Of course what came next was basically a sales pitch for Alan's and Byron's True Nicks program, but hey, that's why all the speakers are here. It's a capitalist country!

9:05 a.m.

Alan Porter will frame the day with a talk on the history of technology use in the Thoroughbred industry. Alan has been recommending matings for many prominent breeders for more than 25 years.

_______________

I will be live-blogging (more or less) the Pedigree and Genetics Symposium in Lexington today, so if you want to check in occasionally to see what's going on, this is the place. Don't know what my frequency will be, but it should be an interesting day with dueling geneticists!

Byron Rogers and Alan Porter at Pedigree Consultants expect a full room of 175 people. The scheduled speakers, in order, will be:

Alan Porter, Pedigree Consultants

Dr. James MacCleod, University of Kentucky, discussing the Equine Genome Project

Steve Tammariello, Thoroughgen LLC, SUNY Binghampton geneticist

Gary Falter, Jockey Club Informations Systems

Bob Fierro, Datatrack International, on the intersection of pedigree, biomechanics, and genetics

Prof. Emmeline Hill, Equinome, University College Dublin, on the Myostatin gene

Dr. Matthew Binns, Equigen LLC, the Genetic Edge, on breeding theories and modern genetics

See ya later!

Flood of Books

2010-10-08T18:44:00.003-05:00

I have been inundated by horse books lately....horse books I actually want to read. But I haven't had time to read any of them. Tony Morris's and Matt Binns's Thoroughbred Breeding: Pedigree Theories and the Science of Genetics arrived this week. I have shelved it neatly on my (wholly metaphorical) bookshelf, right next to Edwin Anthony's The American Thoroughbred and Maryjean Wall's How Kentucky Became Southern.

There is so much to read these days. I read dozens of websites every day, some several times a day, just like everyone else--but I have this blog thingy, so I get to bitch about it. And then there's always a novel or two on my nightstand.

All that takes a rumble seat to writing three days a week, since that's what pays the bills....sorta. But Mim Bower et.al.'s recent paper on the ethnicity, as it were, of the female foundation stock of the Thoroughbred has taken precedence the last couple of days.

The subject has long been one of my pet historical questions. Everybody from Lady Beaverbrook to C.M. Prior has argued that most if not all of the original foundation mares--the mares at the head of modern tail-female lines, were mostly if not all Arabians. That there has been practically no documentary evidence to support that contention seemed to matter not at all.

Bower et.al.'s study uses mtDNA haplotyping to answer the question, at least as accurately as it can at a span of time of roughly 300 years. And, no, most of the 75 or so original mares in the GSB were NOT Arabians. Roughly 8% probably were. The rest were native English and Irish breeds, and a much larger portion were Barbs than previously imagined. That makes sense if one takes into account the Moorish conquest of Spain. Their Barb stock mixed heavily with native Spanish stock, and then spread throughout the continent. And I seem to recall that there are documented importations of mares from Spain and Italy in the records of the Royal Studs, but few if any directly from the Middle East, and much of the assertions about Arabian origin of female lines were based on assumptions that the "Royal mares" at the head of several families were Arabians. Nope, not according to modern genetics.

The publication of the study provides a wonderful lead-in to Monday's Pedigree and Genetics Symposium in Lexington. I'll be there. Will you?

I promise I'll put down my sci-fi novel.

Cinnamon wisdom

2010-09-14T14:12:00.006-05:00

Sitting in the press box at the third session of the Keeneland September yearling sale, and it's fair to say that Keeneland's format changes appear to have been pretty effective. Compared to recent years, there was quite a buzz in the arena Sunday night--but of course selling a $4.2-million horse within the first half hour of the sale is a pretty good substitute for lithium for a horseman.

The horse in question, John and Jerry Amerman's first foal by A.P. Indy out of Balance, by Thunder Gulch, looks remarkably athletic for a horse whose exceptional size bothered no one because of the presence of his giantess "aunt" Zenyatta on the page. A.P. Indys rarely possess the rhythmic, swinging walk and dramatic overstep that is a prerequisite for many European buyers, but this colt does, which is why Demi O'Byrne was the underbidder. Rags to Riches, which O'Byrne bought for $1.9-million had it, and O'Byrne doesn't buy horses that don't. His philosophy is why buy a horse to run that can't walk.

Day three is also going better than expected so far. George Bolton arrived from San Francisco by private plane just in time to buy a Smart Strike colt in partnership with Jess Jackson for $1-million. Bolton was Jackson's partner in Curlin, by Smart Strike, during his three-year-old season. There have been seven other horses for $400,000 or more so far today, which is still a hell of a lot of money for a horse that has never had a saddle on his back.

Breeders as a whole will not really be making any money this year because of the massive investment they made in stud fees in 2008, so perhaps it would be good for them--heck for all of us--to remember the wisdom of late Calumet Farm manager Melvin Cinnamon, as related by Dan Rosenberg.

"On my last day at Calumet," Dan says, "Melvin told me, son, in this business when you guess right you're a smart son of a bitch. When you guess wrong you're a stupid son of a bitch. But the thing you have to remember is that you're always guessing and you're always a son of a bitch."

Ladies and gentlemen

2010-08-19T14:30:00.005-05:00

England's champion older filly Sariska refused to leave the starting gate today in the Yorkshire Oaks. Despite jockey Jamie Spencer's frantic urging, the magnificently made four-year-old daughter of Pivotal out of Maycocks Bay, by Muhtarram, stood almost motionless in her stall as the rest of the field raced away across the Knavesmire.

Refusal to race has become a rarity since mechanical starting gates became universal virtually the world over in the 1960s. The most recent comparable incident I can think of in a major race is, of course, Quality Road's refusal to enter the starting gate before the 2009 Breeders' Cup Classic. Refusal to enter the gate and refusal to leave it are, of course, quite different problems for a trainer. Todd Pletcher has done a wonderful job helping Quality Road get over the panic attacks that caused him to lash out dangerously before the Breeders' Cup and then refuse to get on a plane a few days later.

Sariska's trainer Michael Bell speculated that his filly might have refused at York because the gate to the stable area is right next to the 1 1/2 mile start point, implying that the filly just wanted to go back to her box. She didn't get to immediately. Once Spencer and the gate attendants extricated her from the stalls, he had to canter her down the course to unsaddle and weigh in. A very large horse, though not as big as Quality Road or Zenyatta, Sariska has had issues about going into the stalls--which are notably smaller in Europe than in America--but had never before shown any inclination to stay in them any longer than necessary.

When a horse reveals temperamental quirks, racing folk are always quick to look to the pedigree to find reasons for such behavior, but none are readily apparent in Sariska's case. The only horse close up in her pedigree with any sort of temperament issues that I know of is Alleged, sire of her broodmare sire Muhtarram, and Alleged was a totally honest racehorse who only became a difficult, somewhat dangerous animal after several years at stud.

One cannot help but be reminded, however, of other famously temperamental racehorses of the last century, most notably Nasrullah and some of his sons. Unlike his brilliant sprinting son Grey Sovereign (who appears in Sariska's pedigree) Nasrullah himself never completely refused to race, but Phil Bull's acerbically humorous description of his behavior before his first start at three says all too much about his temperament:

"He refused to leave the paddock; he refused to break into a trot; he refused to respond to the blandishments of the friendly hack sent out on the course to kid him; he refused to do anything except behave like a spoiled child. ....Could the catcalls and cries of derision which greeted this unthoroughbred-like behavior have been heard by [his sire] Nearco across at Beech House stud...it might have had a serious effect on his fertility."

That comical description in Bull's Best Horses of 1943 sits adjacent to the accompanying photo of Nasrullah (above) , which includes the best caption I have ever read for a racing photo. A few pages further on, Bull included a photo of Nasrullah lunging sideways with another contender for best caption--"Nasrullah impersonating a mule".

Nasrullah appears three times in Sariska's pedigree, a rather lower dosage than average actually, but it would be worse than foolish to attribute Sariska's behavior to such a distant ancestor. Some behavior traits are certainly heritable, but, even with the rapidly emerging genetic screening techniques now available, it is impossible to attribute them to specific ancestors--at least so far.

The Yorkshire Oaks was only her fouth loss in nine starts in a career that includes victories in the 2009 Epsom and Irish Oaks, and she had beaten today's winner Midday on all three of their previous meetings. Hopefully Bell will be able to convince Sariska that it is still worthwhile to come out of the stalls when they open, and she will be able to pursue her fall objective, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.

The Saratoga conundrum

2010-08-03T07:53:00.004-05:00

Sheikh Mohammed bought eight horses for $3,155,000 at the opening session of the Saratoga select sale last night. That was more than three times as many horses and three times as much money as any other buyer spent on the sale's opening night.

The Sheikh did not buy every expensive horse, however, nor every horse he bid on. Although it is true that his representative John Ferguson signed for the session's top-priced horse, a beautiful $800,000 colt by Sheikh Mohammed's homebred champion and top sire Street Cry, the next most expensive horse he purchased, a $400,000 Smart Strike filly, ranked only eighth on the list of high prices.

Early in the session I commended Ferguson for letting someone else win after he stopped bidding at $425,000 on a gorgeous Rock Hard Ten colt bought by Charlotte Weber's Live Oak Plantation. He responded tellingly, "This sale has to succeed."

Ferguson, and no doubt the Sheikh as well, is always aware of Darley's dominant position in the market for racing prospects and of both the good and the harm that dominance can do. For the market to thrive, it needs Sheikh Mohammed to compete for what are perceived as the most desirable prospects. And the man is a competitor. He wants to win every time.

If he wins every time, however, other competitors who, however wealthy, do not possess Sheikh Mohammed's bottomless pockets, will decide that it is useless to even try to buy horses they think he might bid on. That inevitably leads to nice horses who would otherwise sell well being led out unsold.

That conundrum is especially acute at Saratoga for three reasons. The sale is so small--less than 200 horses--that it would be all too easy for buyers to decide that it is useless to make the trip for such a small number of horses when Sheikh Mohammed is going to buy all the good ones anyway. They would, of course, be wrong (good ones ALWAYS escape the big buyers' attention...you just have to find them), but perception is everything.

Secondly, fair or not, true or not, Sheikh Mohammed is widely believed to be Fasig-Tipton's principal owner. Abdulla al Habbai, principal of the firm's nominal owner, Synergy Investments, is described as a "close associate" of Sheikh Mohammed. It is all too facile for cynical observers to leap to snide assumptions about what that really means. In the age of Faux News, the truth doesn't seem to matter as much as it once did.

Finally, both the management of Fasig-Tipton and, one hopes, Ferguson and the Sheikh, are aware of Fasig-Tipton's history. In the late 1980s Peter Brant and partners, including J.T. Lundy of Calumet Farm bought Fasig-Tipton. They came close to destroying it by running their own horses through the sale and creating bogus sales of those horses at inflated prices. Legitimate buyers and other consignors began deserting the sale and only John Hettinger's intervention to buy out Brant, plus years of gut-wrenching work by the management team led by D.G. van Clief, saved the company.

Sheikh Mohammed is not a commercial breeder and does not sell yearlings at Saratoga, but if buyers begin to feel that they are competing against "house money" at Saratoga, many of them will decide to buy elsewhere.

And that is why John Ferguson will stop bidding more often than you might think.

New life for an old lady

2010-08-01T19:07:00.003-05:00

It would be facile and sentimental to say "Saratoga never changes." It would also be a lie.

I'm as guilty as anyone of settling for the easy lie sometimes, but, no, not at Saratoga. The town, the track, the sales grounds, the horses retain their charm, but the world around them has changed too much for any place, no matter how determinedly charming, to remain unchanged.

I first came to Saratoga in 1974 and have returned most years since. Most things about the track itself are better now than they were then, but the impossibly cramped boxes are still just as uncomfortable, but otherwise, the facility has improved. Even in these recessionary times, crowds are bigger than they were then.

Tonight, Fasig-Tipton removed the veil, almost literally from the Grande Dame of Thoroughbred sales facilities, the Humphrey S. Finney pavilion at the corner of East and Madison in Saratoga Springs. Built in 1968, the Finney was then state of the art, but for the last 20 years or so has felt cramped and outdated. Not any more.

As with their redesign of the common areas behind the pavilion last year, Fasig-Tipton has done the old girl justice. Anyone who has been inside a modern corporate board room will be familiar with the decor--classy, elegant and simple. Lots of wood and stone, appropriate for a horse auction facility.

The redesign of the Finney resulted in 35% fewer seats, but expansion in critical spaces resulted in lots more room for buyers to mingle, and, without doubt, trade. The old building no longer feels cramped.

Fasig threw a very nice party for the occasion, complete with a brief ribbon-cutting ceremony, the Doc Scantlin orchestra, and catered hors d'oeuvres and buffet. Now let's see if the sale can match the party.

Distance=perspective

2010-07-15T20:37:00.005-05:00

Distance is supposed to give one perspective.....and I suppose it does. But my conclusions about the Fasig-Tipton July sale are no different today from the banks of the Caney Fork in Tennessee than they were yesterday from the banks of Elkhorn Creek in Kentucky.

The market for Thoroughbred racing prospects still appears to be bouncing along at the bottom of a deep valley. There does not appear to be any significant prospect of climbing out of that valley anytime soon. At the moment, on the other hand, there does not appear to be any likelihood of it dropping off another cliff either. Cliffs, however, have a disturbing propensity to appear out of nowhere in the cartoon universe in which we now live, courtesy of....well, don't get me started.

As a result of the economic uncertainty with which we all live, buyers appear to have finally figured out that it is really stupid to pay a premium for the progeny of first-year stallions. Ironically, this burst of intelligence arrived in a year graced by perhaps the most promising group of first-year stallions of the last five years, most of them owned by Darley.

One or more of Darley's stellar group of firsters--Any Given Saturday, Discreet Cat, Hard Spun, and Street Sense--is virtually certain to develop into a first-rate stallion. Opinions vary on which is the most likely to light the lights, but Hard Spun was the horse to whom breeders were most eager to send a mare two years ago, and he led first-year sires at the sale with three or more sold. All four of the Darley horses had their moments, though, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out when some real numbers are added to the statistics in September.

This is likely to be the toughest year for commercial breeders in this cycle. Stud fees were at their highest in 2008 when these yearlings were conceived and prices are (hopefully) at their lowest point in the cycle. That is like buying at retail and selling at wholesale--not a formula for making money.

The underlying question, though, is have stud fees come down enough even now? At the end of the sales season it will be interesting to compare the stud fee ratios based on stud fee at conception versus current year stud fee. It may not be pretty.

The object of the game

2010-07-13T18:16:00.006-05:00

Like most horse sales these days--and for the foreseeable future--the first session of the Fasig-Tipton July sale was a mixed bag. Yes, average and median both increased, but, with a significantly smaller catalog, total proceeds to breeders declined by $1.2-million compared to the same session in 2009.

The killing statistic for commercial breeders, though, is the actual clearance rate. 107 of the 170 horses through the ring were listed as sold, which leaves a 37.1% buy back rate, which is bad enough, but not disastrous on the surface. When you consider the fact, however, that 203 horses were cataloged for the first session, that means that only 52.7% of the horses breeders planned to sell at the first session found apparent buyers--and there are always a percentage of reported sales that remain the property of their owners.

The only reason that the final buy back rate was not over 40%--where it hovered throughout the day--was that Fasig-Tipton now (correctly) includes after market private sales that are reported to them in their statistics. A dozen yearlings were listed in the final results with "PS" for private sale beside the price.

Everybody in the business knows that this crop of yearlings was bred on stud fees that reflected the inflated market that existed before the economic crash of October 2008, and that it is going to be very difficult to make money overall this year. That's why it was so disappointing--shocking really--to see so many yearlings listed as not sold for substantial multiples of their stud fees.

Consignors and breeders always have excuses (they're called "reasons" in their minds), but it is difficult for a disinterested observer to understand why anyone would not accept $70,000 for a yearling by Sun King, $75,000 for a Bob and John, $74,000 for a Flashy Bull, or $100,000 for a Rockport Harbor. All of those hammer prices represent more than four times the stud fee presumably invested, and, regardless of how promising the yearling is or how much the breeder paid for the mare, that should be an acceptable return on investment in a severely depressed market.

I don't mean to pick on any breeder or any consignor by mentioning those particular failed transactions, but it should be clear to everyone by now that we live in a changed environment. If the object of the exercise is to sell the horse, then sell the damned horse when offered a reasonable profit.

Fasig-Tipton removed the second-year horses from their young sire showcase (the first 144 hips) since they'd been getting killed on those horses the last couple of years. That is, in fact the main reason the average was up slightly. Take a big chunk of the least desirable horses out of the sale, if your average doesn't go up then you're really in trouble.

But buyers clearly are no longer paying the same kind of premium they once did for first-year sires. If they were, the average would have been substantially higher. This is a good thing. Paying more for progeny of first year sires just because they were by first year sires never made any sense. It was a fantasy cleverly exploited by breeders and pinhookers that has severely distorted the stallion market.

The reversal of that 15-year trend is the best thing that happened today.

The big dogs are loose

2010-07-12T18:36:00.003-05:00

It's got to be a good sign when you walk into the barn area at a horse sale and the first thing you see is John Ferguson of Darley looking at a horse on one side of a show ring and Paul Shanahan of Coolmore looking at another one on the other side of the ring. And it can't be bad when they then switch positions and horses.

Who knows what it really means at the Fasig-Tipton Kentucky July sale, though. Historically neither Darley nor Coolmore buys large numbers of horses on Newtown Pike, but consignors always have a bit more hope when the big dogs are on the loose.

But mostly, FTK July is not that kind of sale. Pinhookers are everywhere, if for no other reason than the sales company caters specifically to them in the horses they select. A horse chosen for a yearling sale in July, by definition, has to be precociously mature, which, historically, is exactly what pinhookers have to have, even among their two-turn horses.

One veteran, highly successful pinhooker told me that he thought this is the best collection of horses he has seen at FTK July. I'm sure if I'd asked around I could have found another pinhooker who thinks it's the most useless collection of manes and tails in history, but, from my own somewhat casual observations, there are plenty of attractive racehorses here.

The one horse that tickled my fancy the most has absolutely no chance of topping the sale. From the late '70s through the 1980s and early '90s, maybe 25% or more of select yearling sales would be small to medium-sized, muscular, typey, elegant, refined horses with tremendously athletic walks, horses that looked like their sire (or grandsire), the immortal Northern Dancer. Although the Northern Dancer male line remains powerfully prominent, that physical type has all but disappeared from yearling sales.

The shift began with the bloodstock crash of the late '80s, when Sheikh Mohammed, Coolmore, Stavros Niarchos, and other big European-based buyers cut back their buying severely at American auctions. American commercial breeders shifted their focus to American dirt sires, away from the European-raced champions who had dominated the sales rings in the '70s and '80s. Yearling sales--or at least American yearling sales--are now dominated by big, powerful horses who are likely to be suited to dirt racing. That may change over the next few years because of synthetics, but that has certainly been the trend for most of the last 20 years.

Four Star Sales's High Cotton colt out of Echo Bluff, by Pine Bluff, is a throwback. He would have fit right in at a mid-1980s yearling sale. He bears the mark of Northern Dancer proudly. High Cotton was a good, honest racehorse, and his sire, Dixie Union also resembles his grandsire Northern Dancer, but High Cotton is not on anyone's list of prospective sires of sale toppers.

His son at FTK July is inbred 4x6x4 to Northern Dancer, but the percentage of horses in the breed inbred to Northern Dancer is rapidly approaching 50%, so that is no real explanation.

The new DNA testing services are useful aids in selecting horses, but they have little to say so far about such genetic mysteries. Some day that may change, but, thankfully, atavistic wonders can still delight us and inspire a stroll into nostalgia-land.

Where are Cuz and Tom when we need them?

2010-07-11T17:57:00.005-05:00

Blogging is a very odd--in my case--hobby....or at least that's the best label I can come up with at the moment for what I do here. Certainly not a job, since the only income is psychic.

When you get into a rhythm of posting--once a week, twice a month, every day...whatever--posts flow fairly easily and steadily. When real life intervenes in the form of hernia surgery followed by a series of (welcome) guests, excuses not to post proliferate, as natural as breathing.

But life goes on and yearling sales season is here. July nowadays is not very much like July in Lexington from 1945 through 2002, the year the Keeneland July sale of selected yearlings died a rather ignominious death. For much of that period, Keeneland July was the social event of the Lexington summer, as well as being the most important and expensive horse sale in the world.

My first Keeneland July sale was 1970, when Majestic Prince's brother Crowned Prince sold for a then-record $510,000. Those two sons of Raise a Native (comprising two-thirds of the only set of three brothers to set world record yearling prices) were bred at Spendthrift Farm and sold by the inimitable Leslie Combs II.

Cousin Leslie set the tone at Keeneland July, and motivated other consignors like Tom Gentry to stage ever more lavish parties to lubricate buyers and loosen their grip on their wallets. Sheikh Mohammed's Dubai World Cup parties have nothing on the Tom Gentry parties of the 1980s.

That all came to an end with the bloodstock recession of the late '80s. Spendthrift and Gentry both imploded in different ways, and once Keeneland inaugurated select sessions at the September sale in 1989, the July sale was doomed.

Fasig-Tipton's new, Dubai-based ownership is making an effort to return a hint of glamor to July. That is surely one of the things that Thoroughbred racing in general and the auction scene in particular, needs.

Once one reaches a certain age, the contemporary world never seems as glamorous, as exciting, somehow as real, as the world of our youth. We could use more than a few Cousin Leslies and Tom Gentrys about now.

Colin's Ghost

2010-05-27T16:53:00.003-05:00

Any of my intrepid readers who have not yet found Colin's Ghost should surf on over and read Kevin Martin's excellent history of the original Monmouth Parks (yes there were two). Terrific piece sourced to original newspaper articles and maps that shows, among other things, where the 19th century facilities were compared to the modern racecourse.

Enjoy!

Hellzapoppin!

2010-05-24T14:24:00.003-05:00

I've been spending most of my time on the couch this week recovering from minor hernia surgery, but that doesn't mean that the rest of the world has been just as supine. No, the blogosphere has been aTwitter, as it were, about subjects we've been curmudgeoning about lately.

Stephen P. Harrison, founder of England's Thoroughbred Genetics company, filed a US Patent application on processes for DNA testing in general and mtDNA testing specifically....or at least I think that's what this is about. And there's no information on filing date that I can find on that web page, so it's impossible to tell how recent it is. We discussed Harrison's Irish competitors here, here, and here a few months ago, and I've since learned a lot more about some other competitors, which, unfortunately, I'm not yet at liberty to discuss.

The bottom line for all four of the genetic testing companies I know about so far is that the genetic tests currently available certainly have some utility. Just how much utility, and just how much better they might be than a really competent expert opinion is a matter for each breeder to decide. There are currently at least three different kinds of tests on offer at wildly varying prices, so the sensible thing for the thoughtful breeder to do is investigate what is available for themselves and make an informed decision.

Then today, Frank Mitchell led me to Bill Finley's excellent article on ESPN.com about Lasix. I had my say about that a couple of months ago as well, but Bill says it better. If you read the comments, Bill got a lot of the same kind of quasi abusive response some of my gentle readers hurled my way a few months ago. Not that I'm still pouting about that or anything. I'm the curmudgeon, dammit, not you! (Must be the medication.)

Well, they're wrong and Bill is absolutely right. We simply cannot continue to destroy racehorses and horse racing with drugs, and that is exactly what is happening. Banning Lasix, Bute and everything else from the Triple Crown races is a very modest start....way too modest in my not so humble opinion. How about banning any horse who has run on Lasix or Bute or Kentucky's infamous "adjunct medications" during the calendar year from running in a Breeders' Cup race?

Is there anyone with any guts left over at the Breeders' Cup?

I'm still resting on the couch, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Hook me back up to the feel-good juice please!

Time travel

2010-05-12T17:07:00.005-05:00

My first trip to the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico was hardly as amusing as my first trip to the Kentucky Derby.

In the fall of 1968 I moved to Baltimore to attend graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. I made my first trip to Pimlico that November to witness the Pimlico Futurity. In that era, the Pimlico Futurity ranked behind only the Champagne and perhaps the Belmont Futurity in prestige among juvenile races, and the 1968 edition attracted a field for the ages. With the exception of eventual champion two-year-old Top Knight and the then unraced Majestic Prince, it included what turned out to be the best members of the 1966 generation, but I was primarily interested in one horse: Paul Mellon's Arts and Letters. A beautiful, perfectly conformed liver chestnut, he was from the fifth American crop of my all-time hero *Ribot and had shown enormous promise in his first five races. Arts and Letters was a bit unlucky in the Futurity, getting caught inside in the stretch with no room, but finished a close fourth to King Emperor, by Bold Ruler (2nd only to Top Knight that year and winner of 6 of 8 2yo starts), the leggy, lightly made Dike, by *Herbager, and the dour Mr. Leader, by Hail to Reason.

By the time the Preakness rolled around the next spring, Top Knight had disappointed in the Kentucky Derby, King Emperor was running in shorter races, Mr. Leader was getting ready to run on grass, and Arts and Letters and Dike had just run a close second and third to Majestic Prince in a thrilling Kentucky Derby. Naturally, the unbeaten Majestic Prince was favored to win the Preakness, but, needless to say, my $2 was squarely on the nose of Arts and Letters.

I should have collected too. Arts and Letters' jockey Braulio Baeza had let Bill Hartack on Majestic Prince get the jump on him at Churchill Downs, and he was determined to take position to the Prince's outside and at his saddle girth at Pimlico. That plan went awry at the break, when Al Hattab, drawn to his outside, bumped Arts and Letters solidly. Al Hattab was a good horse, but something must have been bothering him that day, because he laid on Arts and Letters all the way down the stretch the first time by the stands, making it impossible for Baeza to place his *Ribot colt where he wanted to be. That allowed Majestic Prince to take perfect position once again, just off the pacesetter's flanks with no pressure on him from the outside.

Arts and Letters finally shook free coming off the final bend, but by that time, Majestic Prince had accelerated to a comfortable lead. Arts and Letters closed steadily all the way to the wire. One jump past the finish he was in front and going away, but at the wire, Hartack, riding at his powerful best, still had Majestic Prince's head in front.

That was the end of Majestic Prince. He had given everything he had to give and trainer Johnny Longden knew it. He announced that Majestic Prince would return to California and not run in the Belmont, but, with a Triple Crown on the line, owner Frank McMahon overruled him, as indeed he had to do. Arts and Letters ran right past Majestic Prince at the top of the stretch in the Belmont, and never lost again until his final start, when he pulled a suspensory ligament. Majestic Prince never ran again.

Pimlico, regrettably, hasn't changed much since 1969. It's still the same old ugly, ramshackle building, and still the same working-class neighborhood, the same shabby backstretch. That's why attending the Preakness is a little like time travel.

Look closely this Saturday.....Perhaps you'll see the shades of Majestic Prince and Arts and Letters illustrating for their literal and metaphorical descendants what it means to be a Thoroughbred.

Once you get to the bottom of the well...

2010-05-03T18:49:00.006-05:00

As a reporter at the 1994 Belmont Stakes, I rushed down to the track after the race to greet the connections of the winner, Tabasco Cat, but I was immediately struck by the condition of the second place finisher, Go for Gin. I, of course, had a special interest in Gin, having helped buy his dam, Never Knock, for Pam du Pont and having arranged the mating with Cormorant that produced Go for Gin.

Go for Gin had tried to lead all the way in the Belmont, setting honest fractions of 23.80, 47.53, 1:11.36 and 1:35.48, but Tabasco Cat simply had a better turn of foot than Gin did and ran by him in the stretch. In fact, Go for Gin had been on the pace or battling for the lead throughout each of the Triple Crown races of 1994, winning the Kentucky Derby (with Tabasco Cat sixth) and grudgingly conceding a 3/4 margin to the same horse in the Preakness.

Go for Gin did not go very far past the finish line in the Belmont before he pulled up, and when he returned to the scales, he stopped and stood for a very long time, every muscle trembling, the very image of a totally exhausted racehorse. Go for Gin had given every last ounce he had to give in his Triple Crown efforts, and he was never the same horse after that. Nick Zito brought him back at Saratoga, where he ran well enough to finish third in the Forego, but he showed none of the old spark in the Woodward, Jockey Club Gold Cup or Breeders' Cup Classic. Zito tried him three times at four, with two seconds and a third over distances short of his best.

The point of the story is that once you get absolutely to the bottom of a gutsy, genuine, generous racehorse, it takes a very long time for them to get over it--if ever.

Watching the last furlong of the 2009 Woodward Stakes, and watching the winner Rachel Alexandra come back to the stands after the race, I was immediately reminded of that day at Belmont in 1994. I thought Rachel was absolutely all in at the finish, without another ounce of energy to give.

I applauded Jess Jackson's and Steve Asmussen's decision not to race her any more in 2009, because I was convinced it would ruin her as a racehorse if they did.

It also follows that I'm not at all surprised that Rachel has not been quite herself in her two starts this spring. Asmussen himself has referred to a "hangover" from her hard season in 2009, so he pretty clearly understands the potential problem.

Once a horse has felt as much pain as Rachel is bound to have felt at the end of the Woodward, it is doubtful they will ever be willing to put themselves through that much pain again. Maybe she'll make it back. Maybe she'll become once again that beautiful girl who skips along so joyously in front of the pack and then fights to the death when somebody tries to pass her.

Maybe not.

Power and privilege

2010-04-18T09:18:00.005-05:00

My favorite political blogger, Andrew Sullivan, led me to this wonderfully insightful and true paragraph from another blogger, Rod Dreher, whom I do not read regularly:

"What a terrible thing power and privilege can be. Those who live with it come to think of themselves as entitled, and in some sense specially gifted with insight. That's when the trouble begins and the corruption sets in. The thing is, most of us in some way have power and privilege in our own spheres. It is in our nature to lie to ourselves--and when we are entrusted with the care of great institutions (the presidency, the church, banks), the cost of our blindness and hubris can be devastating."

Dreher, in turn, is pivoting off an op-ed piece by conservative Washington Post writer Peggy Noonan (a former Bush speechwriter who should know plenty about power, privilege, and hubris) on the Catholic church's current sexual abuse scandal. But Dreher's paragraph succinctly describes one of Thoroughbred racing's biggest problems. The people in charge are gifted with power and privilege and their blindness and hubris has been pretty devastating over the years.

It began, perhaps, with the late George Widener and his Jockey Club/NYRA (pretty much the same organization at the time) cohorts in the 1960s when Off Track Betting legislation loomed in New York. A product of Victorian paternalism, Widener and his peers believed that the unwashed masses should not be tempted to lose their rent money by being able to bet at the corner drugstore, so they adamantly opposed OTB and refused opportunities to participate and to control the final product.

Most of New York racing's current problems stem from, if not that decision, then certainly that attitude from racing's stewards. They think they know better than we do.

In the 1990s when the movers and shakers managed to co-opt Fred Pope's original, brilliant concept of the National Racing Association and turned it into the NTRA, I was still hopeful that it might work....up until the moment when the philosophical descendants of George Widener killed the inaugural "Go Baby Go" commercial, reportedly because they thought actress Lori Petty looked like a lesbian. That made it obvious that nothing had changed. It didn't matter that audience tests showed that the commercial worked, that it appealed to the audience for which it was designed. Lori Petty's tomboy appearance offended those with power and privilege, and that was more important.

The problem presented by the blindness and hubris of privilege is ultimately more serious for Thoroughbred racing than it is for the church, the nation, or the financial system. If the church, the politicians, and bankers do not mend past errors and set more realistic courses, they lose (at least in theory, though one never knows in the current toxic political climate) their followers, their jobs, their money--which is to say their power and their privilege. If Thoroughbred racing's powers that be continue their long, painful stumble toward oblivion, they may kill the sport they love, but they will still have their money, their power, their privilege in every other sphere of their lives. They will regret the loss, but you can be sure they will not think it was their fault.

Once upon a time the fact that Thoroughbred racing was run as a rich man's hobby was seen as an advantage. That meant that their motives were pure and they made decisions for the good of the sport (of course it was never really that simple and pure, but that was the theory and the sport thrived that way for 300 years).

That era ended around the time that George Widener and friends said no to OTB, but the oligarchy that runs Thoroughbred racing didn't notice for the next 30 years. When they did, when Fred Pope produced his revolutionary proposal, their response was not dissimilar to the response of the Catholic church to the sex abuse scandal--denial followed by self-serving attempts at moderate changes while maintaining power and privilege.

It hasn't worked for the Catholic church, and it hasn't worked for Thoroughbred racing.

Timeform Sees the Stars

2010-04-15T10:53:00.009-05:00

Regular readers of The Pedigree Curmudgeon will remember the lively discussion that ensued last October after this post and this follow up post about the victory of Sea The Stars in the 2009 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Some readers, particularly our good friend Sid Fernando, disagreed somewhat with my rating of Sea The Stars at about 140 on the Timeform scale, believing he should be rated higher.

At the time my personal Timeform-scale ratings of the Arc principals plus Rip Van Winkle, the second best horse in Europe last year, read like this (some of these ratings were explicitly mentioned in the discussion, some not):

Sea The Stars 140

Rip Van Winkle 134

Fame And Glory 132

Youmzain 132

Conduit 130

Dar Re Mi 128

With Timeform's Racehorses of 2009 arriving this week, I thought it would be interesting to post their final ratings on those same horses, so here they are:

Sea The Stars 140

Rip Van Winkle 134

Fame And Glory 133

Youmzain 130

Conduit 130

Dar Re Mi 124

Obviously I'm pleased that my own ratings are so close to Timeform's, but then I possess the considerable advantage of owning every Timeform annual since 1943 in my library. I have read them all cover to cover (some biographies many times over) so I have a pretty good idea of how they go about compiling their ratings.

As I suspected, Timeform does not consider Sea The Stars's Arc performance to be his best. Correctly, in my view, they rate his length score over Rip Van Winkle in the Eclipse Stakes and his 2 1/2 length demolition of Fame And Glory in the Irish Champion as his two best performances. Here's the key paragraph from their 16-page writeup:

"What established Sea The Stars as a great horse was not just the fact of his winning six Group 1 races in a row, but rather his performances in some of those races. His Eclipse performance was that of a true champion, but his performance at Leopardstown was even better, probably the best on turf in Europe since Dancing Brave in the 1986 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe."

Timeform notes that Sea The Stars's superiority could not be measured simply by his margins of victory, "...his racing style and general demeanour often contributing to his winning with something in reserve, while he wasn't usually made to race right through to the end and demonstate his superiority to the full."

Timeform's comments on the Arc are equally apt and revealing: "The prestige of the Arc and the attention focused on Sea The Stars--who was cheered when he came into the paddock--led to the victory being lauded as the finest of his career though, judged solely on the quality of performance, it wasn't on a par with his Eclipse and Irish Champion efforts. ...The impression that Sea The Stars had plenty left was confirmed when Sea The Stars took off again as Stacelita came alongside after the leaders had crossed the line."

That last comment, of course, alludes to something that no one watching on television would have seen. It also makes me, at least, a little sad that trainer John Oxx adamantly resisted pressure to attempt to complete the Triple Crown with Sea The Stars because he was convinced the horse would not stay the almost 1 7/8 mile trip of the St. Leger. Obviously, Oxx knew his horse better than anyone and his opinion must be respected, but I strongly suspect that, like Nijinsky II before him, Sea The Stars was simply so superior to his contemporaries that he would have beaten any of them at any distance.

But of course if he had run in the Leger, we almost certainly would not have seen Sea The Stars burst from the pack at Longchamp, and that was something not to be missed.

Don't waste your money, son

2010-04-09T16:24:00.007-05:00

The occasion of my first visit to Kentucky alluded to in my previous post (Setting the hook, below) was the 1967 Kentucky Derby. I had planned to go to the Derby the previous year, but when my beloved Graustark broke down in the Blue Grass Stakes, that took away my reason for going (as well as, briefly, my reason for living!).

The following spring, though, I boarded a Greyhound in Knoxville and rented a snappy red Corvair when I reached Lexington (yes, Ralph Nader, that Corvair). Since *Ribot was then (and remains now) my ideal racehorse, the first place I visited was Darby Dan Farm. When I pulled up to the stallion barn, the unbeaten Italian was out in his paddock which was surrounded by a six-foot high solid wall of white fence plank. If Ribot could see another stallion he would never stop running the fence. Whether he was still trying to outrun everything else, just as he did on the racecourse, I cannot say.

Ribot was not alone in his paddock. His groom, Floyd (sorry, cannot remember his last name) was sitting in a folding chair near a huge oak in the middle of the field, talking to the horse constantly. Ribot was standing under the tree backed up against the trunk. It took me a while to figure out that the occasional loud "THUNK" I heard was the sound of Ribot lashing out at the tree trunk with a hind leg.

Ribot, of course, was famous for his temperamental quirks, but, contrary to legend was not mean. Bored and capricious, yes, but not mean. When Floyd brought the horse back to his stall, he showed me the hoof marks Ribot had left above the beams at the top of the wall of his stall, perhaps 16 feet up, and the tooth marks where he liked to hang on that beam and chew on it. You can still see that chewed beam in the last stall on the left in the Darby Dan stallion barn, though it's been painted over many times since.

I happened to arrive just before a tour group of folks heading to the Derby in a few days arrived to see the stallions, and Olin Gentry, Darby Dan's legendarily crusty general manager came down from the office to greet the group. When Gentry had finished his spiel and the group was getting back on the bus, I dared to ask the great man's opinion of the chances of Darby Dan's Proud Clarion in the Derby two days hence.

Proud Clarion had a spotty record, nothing close to that of Derby favorite Damascus, but he had finished a closing second in the Blue Grass Stakes the previous week, and I had a powerful hunch that he was going to run big in the Derby. Gentry, who had already bred four Derby winners for E.R. Bradley and one (Chateaugay) for Darby Dan, was not impressed.

"Don't waste your money, son," the old man said, "he's a cheatin' son of a bitch."

Come Derby day, I arrived early, parked the Corvair in the enormous Churchill Downs parking lot, hoping I could find it at the end of the day, and made my way to the infield. This was long before the turf course was built, and long before the chain link fence that keeps infield fans far away from actual horseflesh. I was early enough to find a spot on the rail close to the finish line only a few feet from the track itself.

I had my own binoculars, but I wanted to see the backstretch as well, and, even at 6'3" I wasn't tall enough to see over the crowd satisfactorily, so I bought a small canvas camp stool. This was also well before the days of huge infield TV screens that allow anyone on the grounds to monitor the progress of their favorite horse.

I was a bit more agile at 20 than I am now, so I balanced on the stool and watched Barbs Delight flash to the front out of the gate. I was able to pick out Damascus's polka dot silks settling close to the pace, but Proud Clarion was lost somewhere in the pack.

As the field disappeared around the first turn I carefully got down off the camp stool, pivoted around the opposite direction and climbed back on. As I did so, however, I put my right foot down a little too close to the inside of the wooden support of the stool and felt the canvas start to rip. Determined to stay upright I balanced on the stool as best I could and managed to see that Barbs Delight was still battling for the lead going down the backstretch, with Damascus not far behind, but where the hell was Proud Clarion?

As the horses swept into the home turn that canvas stool split wide open and I crashed to the ground, much to the annoyance and amusement of the folks packed tightly around me. Undaunted, I picked myself up and leaned forward on tiptoe just in time to see the cream and brown silks of Darby Dan sweep past the toiling Damascus, run down Barbs Delight and keep right on going to win the Derby.

That $102.50 to $6 across the board bet remains the biggest longshot I've ever hit.

Setting the hook

2010-04-04T20:45:00.007-05:00

Frank Mitchell's recent historical series prodded me into exploring my own historical wetware and software. There's enough stories in there to fill several books....but since the thought of publishing books of any sort, much less horse books, is enough to reduce strong men to crying for mommy these days, we all know that's not going to happen.

The first horse race I can remember seeing on TV is the 1955 Kentucky Derby. My family had acquired our first television earlier that year and my older sister and I had been fighting over which grainy, blurry shows to watch ever since. I don't know how I won that battle, but I remember Swaps beating Nashua.....not that it meant much to an eight-year-old.

By the time the 1957 Derby rolled around, however, I'd inhaled Walter Farley's Black Stallion series, and a naive Tennessee farm boy was in love with the glamor of horse racing. I had started following racing as well as one could in the Nashville Tennessean--in other words, considerably better than one can now in the same newspaper--and I knew who Bold Ruler and *Gallant Man were. The big, almost black Bold Ruler was surely far closer in appearance to Farley's fictional hero than the diminutive *Gallant Man, but it was the Irish colt's dramatic charge from behind that set the hook in my heart for Thoroughbred racing. *Gallant Man's 8-length Belmont victory in record time a few weeks later established a preference for come-from-behind runners that took years to eradicate.

Ten years later when I made it to Lexington for the first time, Bold Ruler was well established as the Lord of Speed, and, excellent stallion though he was, *Gallant Man was never going to catch him again. I know I took pictures of both horses with my trusty Kodak, but the shot of *Gallant Man has disappeared into the crack of time.

The picture of Bold Ruler above, taken at Claiborne in 1967, does not do him justice. He had a look about him that I have often seen in his descendants that is almost indefinable. It's something about the ears and an airy way of going that keeps showing up over and over again.

I've always been a curious sort though. What is your earliest memory of racing, and what did it mean to you?

Calder Casino

2010-03-10T10:14:00.003-06:00

Arriving at Calder Race Course for the breeze show before the Fasig-Tipton Calder sale last week, I turned into the main entrance off Unity Blvd. and saw.....the Calder Casino. Where last year there was only parking lot CDI has thrown up a building that looks like--well, actually, it looks like a green and yellow warehouse. A gambling palace it isn't.

Sign on the top of the building says Calder Casino. If you make your way around the warehouse to the back of the racecourse grandstand, the sign says Calder Casino. Well, okay, let's drive on around to the paddock side on the eastern end of the grandstand.....Calder Casino. Wait a minute is the track still there? Yep. But you'd never know it from the signage anywhere on the racecourse buildings.

In fact, Calder does not even want horsemen entering what used to be the main entrance anymore. They have opened up what used to be a deliveries access road around the southern perimeter of the property onto Unity Blvd. and undesirables like us are supposed to head to the grandstand and stable area via that two-lane entrance as opposed to the wide, four lane expanses of the redesigned entrance to the casino.

That tells you all you need to know about the ultimate future of slot machines funding horse racing. They may be a short term necessity, but anyone who believes the companies that own "Racinos" won't kill off the race part of that neologism as soon as they dare is living in an alternate reality. All you have to do is read the signs.

Speaking truth to power

2010-02-11T10:55:00.006-06:00

One paragraph from a letter to the editor from owner Dan Foster in the February 6 issue of Thoroughbred Times sums up Thoroughbred racing's biggest problem in two succinct, incontrovertible sentences:

"Horses in racing condition do not need medications. Horses that need medications are not in racing condition."

Foster's letter, speaking truth to power, correctly points out that owners have the power to stop the medication nightmare that has engulfed racing over the last 40 years. All they have to do is stop paying for them. You and I both--and I suspect Dan Foster as well--know how likely that is to happen.

Thoroughbred trainers are addicted to medication (for their horses, not for themselves--at least we hope not!), and most of them don't seem to understand how that addiction has changed and degraded their profession. They also do not seem to understand how it changes and degrades their horses. The overwhelming majority of them have no historical perspective on how this all came about.

In the 1970s, medications--primarily Butazolidin and Lasix--were sold (and sold hard) to the racing industry as a way to keep horses racing and increase the number of starts per horse. In the 1970s, average career starts per foal was 23. Today that number is 14. How's that working out for ya?

Number of starts per year has also declined dramatically over the same time frame.

Lasix (now marketed as Salix for some incomprehensible reason) seems particularly detrimental to the frequent racing of horses. Horses administered Lasix routinely lose around 50 pounds of water weight (that's one reason they run faster). It usually takes weeks for them to build back that lost weight and rebalance their systems. That is one of the main reasons, if not THE main reason, that trainers now insist on spacing their horses races at least three weeks, preferably four or five, apart.

Just this week we witnessed another blow to racing when Jess Jackson declined to race Rachel Alexandra against Zenyatta in the Apple Blossom S.(G1), despite Oaklawn's inflation of the purse to a potential $5-million. The stated reason? The earliest trainer Steve Asmussen could envision giving Rachel a prep race was three weeks before the Apple Blossom's date, and that would not be enough time between starts for the 2009 Horse of the Year.

Why not? Everyone in racing knows why not but they don't want to admit it. It's not as if modern trainers have discovered a new, better way to train horses that requires long breaks between races. It's not because modern horses are not as resilient as Thoroughbreds of 40 years ago (or at least not mostly). It's mostly because no Thoroughbred, then or now, could recover that quickly from the damage done to their systems by the drugs they receive.

Despite the fact that everyone knows that Lasix is hard on horses, even when medication reform is discussed everyone assumes that the one drug that not only will but "should" be allowed to continue is Lasix.

Why?

How many Triple Crown winners would we have had since Affirmed without medications. Does the two week rest after running on Lasix in the Derby followed by a three week rest after running in the Preakness on Lasix put too great a strain on a horse's system? Is it simply coincidence that racing has not had a Triple Crown winner since 1978?

I'm tired of arguing over whether or not banning race-day medications is realistic. That is not the right question. The right question is what is best for the horse. Draining a horse of fluids so that it cannot race again for the next month simply cannot be the best thing for the horse.

We come back to Dan Foster speaking truth to power.

Horses in racing condition do not need medications. Horses that need medications are not in racing condition.

The human touch

2010-01-29T19:11:00.003-06:00

As mentioned in my previous post, I interviewed Emmeline Hill, PhD, geneticist at University College Dublin and co-founder of the new equine genetic testing company Equinome last week for Thoroughbred Times. You'll have to read the interview in the February 13 issue to get that copyrighted information, but, suffice to say, Dr. Hill is personable, straightforward, and highly confident that what she has discovered is valuable information for Thoroughbred owners and breeders.

I'm not so sure. One of the questions I asked Dr. Hill was whether her test is superior to the opinion of an experienced, competent conformation and pedigree professional. Again, you'll have to read the magazine to see her answer.

One of the reasons I have doubts about Dr. Hill's research is sample size. Hill's basic sample size was 148 elite Thoroughbreds. That's pretty small for a study of a population as large as the Thoroughbred. There are certainly more than 500,000 Thoroughbreds alive in the world right now. A few years ago, the number was pushing 1-million, but that has probably declined significantly.

Hill's elite sample gets divided up further into CCs, CTs, and TTs, naturally, producing even smaller samples of horses with those genotypes. One result of that small sample size can be seen in the standard error of the average best racing distance of the three groups.
Standard error is a measure of uncertainty. I'm sure you've all seen political polls that predict that candidate A will win 51% of the vote and candidate B 49% +- 2%. That “+- 2%” is the standard error. In that case, that means that the race is actually a statistical dead heat, since the real percentages for each candidate theoretically could vary by two percentage points and they're only two percentage points apart in the poll. Another poll the next day could (and often does) give exactly the opposite result.

Hill's results show that the best racing distance for horses with the CC genotype that her “speed gene te average st” tests for is 6.2 furlongs, +- 0.8 furlongs. That's not bad. That means that it's pretty likely that the average best winning distance for those horses is going to be between 5.4 and 7 furlongs roughly 70% of the time (in a normal distribution), and 6.2 furlongs is the most likely number. You're probably not going to do much better than that with such a small sample size.

The problem appears with the CTs and TTs. The average best winning distance for CTs is 9.1 furlongs, +- 2.4 furlongs; average for TTs is 10.5 furlongs, +- 2.7 furlongs. I'm not an expert—it's been almost 40 years since my graduate level statistics courses—but those look like pretty big standard errors to me....just the kind you might get from a human expert.

I am quite confident that with the appropriate pedigree information and a good look at the physical horse that I could predict its best racing distance within about a quarter mile pretty damned consistently.

Still, people tend to want what they perceive as certainty. I strongly suspect that many of the large farms and racing stables in England and Ireland have already opted to have all of their horses tested. To a billionaire, the $1400 per horse cost of the test is pretty meaningless.

I also strongly suspect, however, that the test will have virtually no effect on employment of bloodstock agents and other advisers. Equinome's test cannot tell you if that yearling with the genotype you prefer has offset knees or a curby hock, or whether he moves like a racehorse.

That requires a human eye, human intelligence, and human experience.

P.S. It may well be true that Dr. Hill has since gathered more unpublished evidence that reduces the standard error. But the spreads in the data actually make sense in terms of the way horses actually race. There are horses that are purely sprinters. There is another group that can win at sprint distances but are better up to about 9 furlongs. Then there is another group that generally can't beat decent horses at six furlongs but can win between 7 or 8 and 12 furlongs or more. And then there are horses that don't really fit within any of those patterns but are superior at every distance. Those are rare animals indeed.

Don't panic

2010-01-20T14:27:00.005-06:00

As expected, Emmeline Hill, PhD., et.al., published her study on the relationship of specific gene alleles to maximum win distance today at the PLos1 online journal. If you prefer not to slog your way through all the scientific jargon of academe, you can read the commercial version of the results at Equinome, the website of the company founded by Hill and trainer Jim Bolger to market the test based on Hill's research. The core findings are embodied in this page from the website.

Briefly, the research shows that there are two alleles, "C" and "T", at a particular position on a gene that governs muscle mass in Thoroughbreds. This means the horse's genetic code at that particular spot must read either "CC", "CT" or "TT". The important finding from the research on populations of both elite and non-elite Thoroughbreds is that CC horses strongly prefer sprint distances and are more precocious, CTs are mostly milers and 10-furlong horses who may or may not be precocious, and TTs are mostly 10-furlong and up horses.

The distributions of the genes are about the same in the elite and non-elite groups, so Equinome does not claim to test for the class of the animal, just the distance capacity.

What does this mean for those of us who make our livings looking at horses and/or analyzing pedigrees? Not as much as you might first think...at least not if the market responds rationally (perhaps too much to hope for in an irrational business). The important point is that the test has nothing to do with class, only probable distance capacity. I don't know about you, but I think I generally have a pretty good idea of the probable distance capacity of a prospective foal from a mating I recommend. The test would give breeders more information on the prospective sire and dam and the statistical probabilities of the outcome. It is obvious from the data, that in the contemporary, commercial Thoroughbred world, the most desirable combination is CT. And if you mate two CCs or two TTs, you're not going to get any CTs.

It is also obvious, however, that the only way to guarantee you get all CTs is to breed a CC to a TT. In racing mythology, this is what is familiarly known as a "fish and fowl mating", and it is just about as far out of favor as it could get, and for good reason. For instance, if one bred a 2 1/2 mile Ascot Gold Cup winning sire (Yeats, for example) to a filly winner of the 6-furlong Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Sprint (Informed Decision, for example), what would you expect to get? The perfect 10-furlong horse? Well, no. History and practice have shown far too often that this simply does not work well, and it is very rarely attempted these days, even taking into account the fact that Gold Cup winners get virtually no chance at stud nowadays.

If you breed CTs to CTs (the most obvious and common tactic), you're going to get 25% CCs, 50% CTs and 25% TTs. That matches up extraordinarily well with what happens in the real world when you breed an 8-10 furlong sire to an 8-10 furlong mare. You'll get a few fast horses that can't stay, a good number of middle-distance types, and a few slow ones that can gallop forever.

The market response to this test is going to be very interesting indeed. The test is a bit pricey at 1,000 euros (about $1,400 currently) per sample (according to the terms of service on the website), but then if you're pondering spending $1-million on a yearling or even $100,000 on a stud fee, what's $1400? The more interesting question for the prospective racehorse market is....exactly who is going to buy the test?

The problem for yearling or juvenile buyers is that, according to the website, the test takes three weeks, so you can't look at a horse at the yearling sale, obtain a blood sample (and of course obtaining the seller's permission to do so), get it tested, and buy the horse the next day. That means that the real market may actually be the sellers of yearlings and two-year-olds, not the buyers. And if you were selling ten yearlings, would you really want to tell buyers that five of them are CTs, three CCs, and two TTs? I doubt many will, though I can envision an environment where all essentially are forced to do so should a prestigious breeder begin the practice, just as they are now forced to put damning radiographs in repositories. On the American market at least, those two TTs would be just about guaranteed to be no bids, no matter how handsome they might be. Once the horse is bought, of course, then the buyer has plenty of time to find out just what type of horse he has acquired. It seems to me the likelihood of both buyers and sellers utilizing the test is higher in the juvenile market, where horses are breezing well ahead of the sale and both sides have more time to consider their options.

I plan on interviewing Emmeline Hill on behalf of Thoroughbred Times on Thursday, so check into Thoroughbred Times Today and the Thoroughbred Times website for excerpts and into the weekly print issue for the full interview.

The future is now?

2010-01-17T10:16:00.011-06:00

Easily the most interesting thing that flickered across my laptop screen over the last week was this item from the Irish Times. It may also have been the most significant, but it is impossible to tell at this point.

Emmeline Hill is both a horsewoman and a geneticist. Her grandfather, Charmian Hill, owned the immortal jumper Dawn Run, who won 23 of 37 races in the 1980s and remains the only horse to have won the two biggest races at the Cheltenham festival, the Champion Hurdle (1984) and the Cheltenham Gold Cup Steeplechase (1986). Dawn Run is still regarded as the best mare in the history of English National Hunt racing.

Emmeline Hill's primary occupation over the last decade or more, however, has been as a researcher into the genetics of the Thoroughbred. She began her career as a student of and assistant to Patrick Cunningham, the famed geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, one of the first geneticists to publish peer-reviewed research on Thoroughbred genetics. Cunningham's research showed, among other things, that certain founding fathers of the breed--Herod, Eclipse, Godolphin Arabian--each contribute between 13% and 17% of the genes of modern Thoroughbreds. He also showed that racing ability is about 35% heritable, and that the ability of the modern racehorse, as measured by Timeform ratings, is still increasing at a rate predicted by that measure of heritability.

Hill has built upon and markedly expanded the genetic research Cunningham began. Hill led the pioneering study of Mitochondrial DNA patterns in Thoroughbreds published in the August 2002 issue of Animal Genetics that showed that a few hallowed Thoroughbred female lines do not trace to the foundation mare legitimized by the General Stud Book. You can read Patricia Erigero's excellent summary (originally published in Thoroughbred Times) of Hill's mtDNA work at Erigero's and Anne Peters's Thoroughbred Heritage website, which also includes a link to Hill's original Animal Genetics article.

Not surprisingly, far more geneticists work on human genetics than Thoroughbred genetics, and by the mid-naughts, those researchers had discovered more than 140 human genes connected with fitness and athletic performance. Hill began work on cross-referencing those genes with the equine genome and researching their relationship to performance in Thoroughbreds by sequencing DNA of a sizable sample of Thoroughbreds compared to non-Thoroughbreds.

The result of that study was published in the online journal PLOS1 (Public Library of Science) in June 2009, and publicized in the Irish Times.

As published Hill's study shows that, yes, Thoroughbred genetics is different from non-Thoroughbrd genetics in ways that are known to contribute to muscle mass, aerobic and anaerobic energy usage, lung capacity, etc., etc. Surprise, surprise! And, no, I don't mean to belittle this important research, but as far as I can see, that particular paper simply confirmed what any thoughtful horseman already knew--the Thoroughbred possesses better genes for athletic performance than the non-Thoroughbred.

What I am trying to puzzle out now is exactly how this research translates to Hill's and Jim Bolger's new venture, Equinome, which plans to test DNA of prospective sires and dams and prospective racehorses and make recommendations for breeders and buyers. Those recommendations are clearly meant to be based on Hill's research, but nowhere in what has been published is there any information on variations within the population of Thoroughbreds she tested for the study. In fact there are only two sentences in the PLSO1 paper that presage Equinome's proposed services: "We have identified a number of candidate performance genes that may contain variants that could distinguish elite racehorses from members of the population with less genetic potential for success. Revealing such polymorphisms may aid in the early selection of young Thoroughbreds in the multi-billion dollar global Thoroughbred industry."

It is quite possible, even probable, that Hill and colleagues have, in fact, found variations in the Thoroughbred population used in their study, or in larger populations not included in the published study, but, if so, that data has not been published. Therefore, it is impossible at this point to evaluate the validity of the approach. From the information presented in the PLOS1 paper, one could obviously devise a test to tell a Thoroughbred from a non-Thoroughbred, but then, again, we already have that...it's called the Stud Book. From a scientific point of view, it is clear that this could be a fruitful avenue of further research....but that research, if it exists, has not been published.

All we know about the research Hill's and Bolger's tool is based on is this sentence from last week's Irish Time's article: "The test is based on research by Hill into athletic performance traits in horses conducted and the project was supported by the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders Association which provided the required DNA samples from elite racehorses." Well, that is certainly interesting, but it tells us virtually nothing about whether or not this might be a useful tool.

As I said in the beginning, I'm just trying to figure this out. Nothing that I've written above should be taken as a put down of Hill's research or even of the potential usefulness of the tool (though the Irish Times's rather breathless adulation is perhaps a valid target). I hold a graduate degree in a scientific field (statistical experimental psychology), and I have always approached Thoroughbred breeding as a quasi-scientific endeavor, applying the scientific approach to pedigrees as much as our tools allow. I'm not about to denigrate anyone doing real science on Thoroughbred genetics. Instead, I heartily applaud Hill's research and hunger for more. And I accept that in our capitalist world, the line between science and commercialism is essentially non-existent. In fact, University College Dublin's Nova unit, specifically designed to commercialize UCD's research, awarded Hill a grant to help fund Equinome. But I still think the scientific data should be published first and I wonder what business the ITBA has at least indirectly funding this commercial venture as well.

Do elite Thoroughbreds possess different genes in critical locations than the non-elite population? There can be no doubt whatsoever that this is true. Does Equinome have a test that can tell you whether or not a particular Thoroughbred possesses some of those critical genes? Clearly they believe they do.

If they do, then they will forever change the process of buying and selling horses. Mr. Horse Breeder, do you think it's difficult to sell your less attractive, less well-bred horses now? Mr. Pinhooker, do you find it almost impossible to market a horse that cannot work fast? Wait until everyone demands a DNA test before they will buy your product. The individuals targeted no doubt would change, but the gap between the favored few and the rest? If you think it's bad now, you ain't seen nothing yet.

It was rumored at the time that the Maktoum family cooperated with and perhaps helped fund Hill's mtDNA study. It will be interesting over the next few years to see who pays Equinome for their services and whether their record as buyers improves.

The Northern Dancer effect

2010-01-08T14:42:00.007-06:00

Old friend Bill Oppenheim penned one of his most interesting articles in years in the January 6 issue of Thoroughbred Daily News. If you don't subscribe to TDN, that article is behind their pay wall, so I can't help you there.

The theme of the story was Bill's take on the changes in the industry both in the U.S., where he started out and in England, where he now resides (well, Scotland actually) in the last 20 years or so. It's a wide-ranging piece and a very good read that covers the main points pretty accurately and succinctly, with good stuff on the changes in the way people buy horses, the decline of female families as related to owner-breeders, why Europeans don't trust American catalogs, and more.

The most interesting part of the article for this old curmudgeon, however, was the section on inbreeding to Northern Dancer. You'll have to learn about Bill's system of rating runners and sires on your own, but the interesting thing to a pedigree maven is that Bill found that the percentage of his "A runners" (perhaps roughly equivalent to listed winners and above) inbred (though only through sire and broodmare sire lines) to Northern Dancer increased from 4.3% of "A runners" foaled in 1996 to 9.6% of "A runners" foaled in 2005. In other words, about 10% of these elite runners are now by Northern Dancer line horses out of mares by Northern Dancer line horses. But note that he's not counting any other occurrences of Northern Dancer on either the top or the bottom of the pedigree, so, no doubt, he's missing a substantial number of Northern Dancer crosses.

Bill rightly notes all the appropriate caveats about this number, and I'm here to tell you that I have no doubt whatsoever that this represents a serious underestimate of the percentage of horses actually inbred to Northern Dancer among his "A runner" population.

For the racing year of 2008 (the last year Bill's data covered), I kept certain data on every Graded stakes winner in the United States in a spreadsheet, including all inbreedings within the first six generations. 36.5% of them were inbred to Northern Dancer. If I'm not mistaken, Bill's data covers North American racing plus racing in the five major European countries, whereas, as mentioned, my spreadsheet covered only U.S. (not including Canada) racing.

Now here's the thing....Northern Dancer is far, far more widespread in Europe--particularly England and Ireland--than he is currently in the U.S. The son of Nearctic so thoroughly dominates European racing that over half (71 of 140) of the stallions currently listed in Weatherby's stallion book are Northern Dancer line stallions....and most of the non-Northern Dancer line horses will have at least one cross of Northern Dancer on the bottom side.

By contrast, of the 501 horses listed in the Thoroughbred Times online Stallion directory, 162, or 32.4% are from the Northern Dancer male line. That's just one illustration of how much more dominant Northern Dancer is in Europe than in the U.S., but it helps explain why I'm so certain Bill's figures on inbreeding to Northern Dancer are much too low. If the percentage of graded winners in the U.S. inbred to Northern Dancer is somewhere around 35% (and rising, by the way) then it simply has to be higher than that in Europe where Northern Dancer has been totally dominant for the last 20 years. The last time a horse from a male line other than Northern Dancer led the English sire list was 1989 when Blushing Groom topped the list. As we've been discussing this week, exactly how many times which sire line topped the North American list is a vexed question at best, but no matter how you count it, Northern Dancers have stood at the top no more than half the time over that 20 year span.

Now, let's be clear. Neither Bill nor I are complaining about inbreeding to Northern Dancer. It's very clearly a good thing. As Vuillier pointed out over 100 years ago, the best horses (graded stakes winners in this case) of the present basically predict the pedigrees of the future because they're the ones that get the best chance to breed on. So obviously the future of the breed is inbreeding to Northern Dancer.

Those who don't like it can try to avoid it if they wish...at their own cost.

None of this makes any sense

2010-01-06T17:11:00.006-06:00

This will be my last post on sire lists. I promise.

Here's the deal.

Thoroughbred Times's general sire list includes earnings for North American-based sires from the 18 countries for which the Jockey Club database receives complete racing data. According to the Thoroughbred Times general sire list, Giant's Causeway was leading sire of 2009 with earnings of $15,950,453. (Full disclosure: I currently write part time for Thoroughbred Times and was intimately involved in developing the software that produces that list.). Thoroughbred Times also calculates a general sire list for its annual Racing Almanac by North American earnings only. By that criteria, Smart Strike was leading sire in North America in 2009 with earnings of $9,048,551.

The Blood-Horse general sire list includes earnings for North American-based sires for Northern Hemisphere countries--except Hong Kong and Japan (I think....I don't receive the BH print magazine and can't find any explanation online). According to the Blood-Horse general sire list, Giant's Causeway was leading sire of 2009 with earnings of $11,079,918. The Blood-Horse also makes available on their website a leading sire list by North American earnings only. By that criteria, Smart Stike was leading sire of 2009 with earnings of $9,048,551. Like Thoroughbred Times, however, the Blood-Horse uses its list that includes international earnings to designate their leading sire.

The Jockey Club's EquineLine sire reports also report Giant's Causeway as leading sire. According to a Jockey Club representative, they use basically the same criteria as the Blood-Horse "to avoid over inflating progeny earnings because of the purses in Japan/Hong Kong." Okay, so you use earnings from the richest day in Thoroughbred racing--Dubai World Cup day, but don't use Japan and Hong Kong because they "inflate" progeny earnings. Somehow I thought inflating progeny earnings was what sire lists were all about, but never mind.

The Daily Racing Form's sire lists (which, again, I don't see the print version so someone tell me if I have this wrong) list Smart Strike as leading sire of 2009, because their list is based on earnings in North America and Dubai World Cup day only. That's right....not all of Dubai, just World Cup day.

Bloodstock Research's Bloodstock Journal and Brisnet service publishes a leading sire list on their website, but frankly I have no idea what criteria it is based on, because, although Giant's Causeway is listed as the leader, Cape Cross, who stands in Ireland is listed second, and Irish-based Danehill Dancer and English-based Oasis Dream both appear in the top ten.

The NTRA website--which I suppose is as close to an "official" site for Thoroughbred racing information as anything else, at least to the general sporting public--links to this EquineLine list, which, it turns out, is very similar to the Brisnet list, though the earnings totals are different. Best I can figure, Cape Cross, Danehill Dancer, et.al. are included because they had a starter in North America in 2009.

Is it any wonder the sporting public is confused by and steadily losing interest in Thoroughbred racing? We can't even begin to agree on how to keep our most vital statistics. By my count we have at least five different ways of counting what should be a simple thing, and, as a result, come up with two different horses as leading sire.

None of this makes any sense.

No other country in the world that I know of includes racing outside their borders in their leading sire statistics. And, yes, when I participated in producing specs for the Thoroughbred Times sire list software, I argued in favor of including worldwide earnings, because that gives the most complete picture of the sire's accomplishments, though, in my defense, I insisted we calculate a North America only list as well.

Sire lists that reflect worldwide earnings keep advertisers happy, because they generally give higher numbers. We have to have those stats, and sire lists based on international earnings (all international earnings--no picking and choosing what countries you use) are a perfectly valid way to look at it. But, ultimately, that should not determine the leading North American sire.

That title should be determined by earnings in North America only. And nobody in the business--that's right, nobody--uses those criteria to determine the horse they call simply "leading sire."

Making a New Year's list

2009-12-31T09:05:00.004-06:00

With the end of 2009 (thankfully) upon us, year-end sire lists have been on my mind for a variety of reasons. The entertaining contest between Roman Ruler and Offlee Wild for leading freshman sire has come down to the last day of the year with Roman Ruler a few hundred dollars ahead--or is he? Both the Thoroughbred Times and Blood-Horse lists credit Roman Ruler with $1,939,951 and Offlee Wild with $1,939,243 before racing in the U.S. begins today.

Both the Times and the Blood-Horse acquire those figures from the Jockey Club's database but they do it in rather different ways. The Times counts earnings from all 18 countries for which the Jockey Club receives complete racing in digitized form. The Blood-Horse counts earnings from some countries but not others, according to a logic that is frankly outdated and outmoded. The two ways of counting happen to agree on these two horses, but not on other sire lists, not by a long shot.

For example, both organizations list Giant's Causeway as leading general sire, but TT credits him with earnings of $15,895,171 and BH with $11,027,789. As we've mentioned before (read it here) the Blood-Horse counts earnings from Dubai and Europe, but not Japan or Southern Hemisphere countries, and Giant's Causeway's offspring have earned substantial amounts--about $4.8 million--in those countries. Seems to me one should either count all foreign earnings or none at all. There's a logical argument to support doing it either way, there's even a logical argument for counting Northern Hemisphere earnings but not Southern Hemisphere--the shuttle sire problem, you know. But I've yet to hear anything approaching a valid argument for counting some foreign earnings from the Northern Hemisphere but not others.

But regardless, Giant's Causeway will be leading sire, right? Not so fast. Leading sire by North American earnings only (the "none at all" option mentioned above) is....wait for it.....Smart Strike.....for the third consecutive year. Giant's Causeway had a great year in North America, but ranks fourth according to earnings on the continent where he primarily stands, about $800,000 behind Smart Strike, with A.P. Indy and Distorted Humor in second and third. Smart Strike ranks third on the Times list (behind second-placed Street Cry, another who does well abroad) and third on the BH list (behind second-placed Distorted Humor).

The difference in countries being counted also shows up if you run the freshman sire list by North American earnings only. All of Offlee Wild's freshman earnings are in NA, but Roman Ruler's NA total is only $1,895,313, apparently because he has a winner in Mexico and a winner in Puerto Rico......which apparently are not part of North America....Got that?

All this probably is not going to matter this particular year because Offlee Wild has a runner today--and a good one, stakes winner Heavenliness--and Roman Ruler does not. The smart money has to be on Offlee Wild, no matter how you count it.

This is all very confusing, but not any more confusing than the situation in Argentina. Recently I noticed that the lists of annual leaders in Argentina according to earnings by racing season and the official lists on maintained by the Stud Book Argentino differ markedly. Then my friend Ned Moore, an Argentine bloodstock agent, adviser, and all around raconteur who lives in Virginia most of the year, reminded me that the official sire list in Argentina has always been based on calendar year rather than the Argentine racing season, which runs from July 1 of one year to June 30 of the next. I knew that!

This makes even less sense than counting some foreign earnings but not all. The Argentines have been doing it that way since 1883, however, so I somehow doubt that they're going to change their minds now just because I don't like it.

Those Argentines! They need to learn to count like us good, straightforward Americans! Or is that North Americans?

White wonder

2009-12-26T18:37:00.005-06:00

Something kind of wonderful happened in Japan about 18 months ago, but, so far as I can tell it has completely escaped the notice of the American media. If I've missed something, let me know, but I've Googled it and searched on the appropriate websites, and can't find any coverage in the American racing press.

In June of 2008 at Kawasaki (yeah, that's right) Racecourse, a filly named Yukichan won a race called the Kanto Oaks. Never heard of it? Well neither had I until I ran across Yukichan, but it qualifies both for black type and as a stakes race according to international cataloging rules.

What makes this kind of wonderful is that Yukichan is white. If you click on the two links above you'll see that not only is she pure white, but quite an attractive filly who moves like a good horse both on both dirt and turf. She totally dominated her opposition in the Kanto Oaks (which perhaps would be on the level of a winter stakes at Turfway Park), winning easily by eight lengths under great Japanese jockey Yutaka Take, who barely moved on her. Yukichan has placed in two other, better, stakes.

I'm pretty sure this is the first time a Thoroughbred registered as white has won a stakes race anywhere in the world. Now personally, I've never been particularly enamored with white Thoroughbreds since, genetically, coat color is not an indicator of anything except coat color, but some folks just go absolutely gaga over them, so I'm surprised that no one over here seems to have picked up on this pretty filly's accomplishments.

"Yuki" means snow in Japanese and "chan" is an endearment often tacked onto Japanese names, so Yukichan would mean something like Snow Darling in English, which is appropriate enough.

The most interesting question about Yukichan is how she came to be white in the first place. Her sire, Kurofune, by French Deputy, was a very high-class racehorse, winning six of 10 starts, including the Japan Cup Dirt-G1 on dirt and the NHK Mile Cup-G1 on turf, which earned him champion 3yo colt honors in 2001. Kurofune's stud record is spotty, with only six stakes winners from about 500 foals, but two of them are Japanese champions.

Kurofune's color is classified by the Jockey Club's misleading "gray or roan" designation. Don't get me started, but since gray and roan coat colors are caused by different alleles of the color genes (true roan is very rare in the Thoroughbred), that designation is even more ridiculous than "dark bay or brown".

Anyway, Kurofune's coat color, whether he is a true gray or a true roan, also doesn't have anything directly to do with Yukichan being white. If my understanding of coat color genetics is correct, Kurofune has to be a carrier of the overo gene to be able to sire white offspring, and whether he's gray or not has nothing to do with that. Kurofune's coat color (almost certainly gray) comes from his dam, Blue Avenue, whose dam, Eliza Blue was a gray by the gray horse Icecapade. No sign of white horses there, on the surface at least.

Yukichan's dam, Shirayyukihime ("white snow" in Japanese), on the other hand, is also registered as white. The question is, how the hell did that happen? Her sire was the immortal Sunday Silence, whom the Jockey Club insisted was dark bay or brown, though anyone with normal human color perception would call him black. Not only that, but Yukichan's year-older full brother White Vessel is also white. He has won 3 of 13 starts, but is not a stakes horse.

Shirayukihime's dam, Wave Wind, by the bay Topsider, was also registered as dark bay or brown. The author is intimately familiar with Yukichan's third dam Storm and Sunshine, a lovely, feminine version of her sire Star de Naskra, a horse who raced for and stood at Pillar Stud while I was general manager there. Storm and Sunshine was a very good filly, winning 10 of 19 starts, including the Test-G2 and Post-Deb-G3.

Storm and Sunshine was a solid, mahogany bay, as was Star de Naskra, but her broodmare sire Drone was gray--for what that's worth.

Obviously the overo gene that causes white horses can hide for generations, but often it shows up in modified form somewhere in the horse's pedigree as particularly extensive or unusual white markings. Obviously I don't know exactly what every horse in Yukichan's pedigree looked like, but if there's any sign of white before Shirayukihime popped up, it certainly isn't obvious.

And of course it really doesn't matter. Yukichan is a lovely filly with at least a modicum of talent, and a pretty good pedigree. She would be an asset in most broodmare bands, regardless of color.

Native Dancer's ankles

2009-12-16T18:29:00.006-06:00

A few more notes from Dan Scott's memories of Native Dancer.

Native Dancer was about 16.2 and exceptionally heavy and muscular at maturity, but he was always "the big horse", especially in his own mind. Geisha's son dominated his companions as a weanling and yearling in the paddocks, bullying them when he felt like it, and he was always the first horse to the gate every night.

While in training, Native Dancer famously suffered from osselets, an ailment one never hears mentioned anymore. (Osselets are basically an arthritic bony enlargement on the front of the front ankles). According to Dan, however, the condition was far more cosmetic than painful, but trainer Bill Winfrey loved to talk about them to the press, just to mess with their heads. He often stood Native Dancer in an ice bucket at the front of his stall even if he didn't need it so that rival trainers would think he was less fit than he really was.

Native Dancer came by his ankle problems honestly, though. He was not only massively heavy, but he had short, upright pasterns and a round, pounding action. With that combination, it is remarkable that he stayed as sound as he did for 22 starts. He won 21 of them, of course, losing only when short of work for the Kentucky Derby. Much has been made in retrospect of some minor traffic trouble Native Dancer encountered going into the first turn of the Derby, but the truth was that Winfrey had been forced to rush his preparation after deciding to fire his ankles fairly late in the winter.

Native Dancer was a short horse in the Derby, but finished a closing second to a very good front runner in Dark Star. Would he have won with one more race under his belt or more time between his three preps? If we could rewrite history, I would bet on it.

In the end it was not ankle problems that ended Native Dancer's racing career, but tender feet. He raced only three times at four, winning the Metropolitan Handicap in his only stakes effort before recurring foot bruises forced Winfrey to call it a career. Tom Fool's unbeaten season had robbed Native Dancer of Horse of the Year at three, but voters awarded him something of a career honor by making him Horse of the Year at four despite his brief, relatively inconsequential campaign. No one doubted he was the best racehorse in America in 1954.

Native Dancer stood at Alfred Vanderbilt's Sagamore Farm in the beautiful rolling hills north of Baltimore, Maryland. I first visited Sagamore in 1969 during my grad school years at Johns Hopkins University. Sadly, that was after Native Dancer's death, but his son Restless Native was there.

Native Dancer was a very good sire, especially considering where he stood, far from the best mares in Kentucky. He sired 43 stakes winners from 306 foals (14.1%), an exceptional percentage in any era. His daughter Hula Dancer (bred and owned by Gertie Widener) won eight of nine starts and was one of the greatest fillies in French racing history, though largely forgotten today. Raise a Native was brilliant, inheriting Native Dancer's massive physique and upright pasterns, but his tendons were tied in behind the knee, which led to a bow after only four starts.

Native Dancer's Derby winner Kauai King was probably one of the worst winners of that great race on record, making it to the winner's circle only because neither Buckpasser nor Graustark could run. Dancer's Image, of course, deserved to win the Derby, Butazolidin or not.

Native Dancer's genetic legacy, though, looms larger than his own stud career, partly because of his daughter Natalma's son Northern Dancer, of course, but more because his genes bear repeating. The constant crossing and recrossing of the Northern Dancer and Mr. Prospector stallions that now dominate our gene pool means that Native Dancer's name appears at least once--and often three or four times--in the pedigree of virtually every stakes winner that crosses the finish line.

Not bad for a horse with "bad ankles".

A short walk to Native Dancer

2009-12-15T18:34:00.005-06:00

Frank Mitchell's recent blog on the influence of Native Dancer (read here)reminded me of the story behind the great gray son of Polynesian.

My house at Pillar Stud, which I managed during the 1980s was located on what had once been Gallagher Stud, and I lived in what was known as Gallagher House. Gallagher was directly across Russell Cave Pike from Dan and Alice Scott's farm. Dan was the son of Harrie B. Scott Sr., manager of Faraway Farm, where Man o' War and War Admiral stood, for the Riddle and Jeffords families. In the 1940s and '50s Dan and Alice, both wonderful people, boarded Alfred G. Vanderbilt's mares, including Native Dancer's dam Geisha, by Discovery.

Alfred Vanderbilt had purchased Discovery as a three-year-old in 1934, and he developed into one of the best horses of the Depressioin era, gaining renown as a great weight carrier and earning Horse of the Year honors in 1935. Discovery was a good but far from great sire of racehorses, but his daughters eventually occupied a unique place in Thoroughbred breeding history as the dams of top racehorses and/or sires Native Dancer, Bold Ruler, Intentionally, Traffic Judge, Hasty Road, and Bed o' Roses.

Discovery was Vanderbilt's foundation sire, and, as a result, Vanderbilt's self-confessed breeding strategy was to breed a Discovery mare to anything. Didn't matter very much to him.

Vanderbilt's maiden winner Geisha produced the decent filly and good producer Orientation, by Questionnaire, in her first season at stud, but she had been difficult to load on the van to take her down Iron Works Pike to Greentree Stud where Questionnaire stood. She was scheduled to go back to Questionnaire in her second season at stud, but she categorically refused to get on the van and could not be covered.

As it happened, Vanderbilt's cousin Gertie Widener stood her 1945 Preakness winner and '47 champion sprinter Polynesian at Gallagher Stud, then owned by Ira Drymon and his son Jimmy, who managed Mrs. Widener's mares. Since Polynesian was a first class racehorse, an excellent specimen, and right across the road, Dan Scott suggested to Ralph Kercheval, Vanderbilt's manager, that Geisha should be walked across Russell Cave Pike and covered by Polynesian, instead of risking life and limb to get her on a van.

The result, of course, was Native Dancer.

When I lived at Gallagher House during the 1980s, I bought a gelding by Crimson Satan out of Raise a Pocket, by Raise a Native, as a riding horse for my daughter Cassie. Named Satan's Pocket, he had been useless as a racehorse because of a breathing problem. Satan's Pocket was not a big horse, but he looked very much like his maternal grandsire Raise a Native, Native Dancer's best sire son.

Satan's Pocket definitely had a mind of his own, like his great-great grandam Geisha, and set yours truly off on his backside more than once. Let's just say he had a talent for "stumbling" at awkward moments.

Satan's Pocket and my son's half-Shetland pony from Tennessee were stabled side by side in what had once been the two-stall stallion barn behind Gallagher House where Polynesian once stood.

Somehow that seemed appropriate.

Late to the dance

2009-12-02T14:53:00.002-06:00

Due to the circumstances detailed in my previous post I did not participate in the debate over whether Rachel Alexandra or Zenyatta should win Horse of the Year--much less whether the Eclipse Award voting rules should be changed so that there could be co-honorees.

Of all the bad ideas that have cropped up in Thoroughbred racing--many of which, sadly, were implemented--changing the voting rules surely was one of the worst. Sure, let's put the fix in so that both horses can win, that'll show the public how dedicated we are to playing by the rules. I was horrified when the idea came up (and let NTWA President Tom Law know my feelings), amazed when one of the three voting blocs actually approved it, and delighted when the other two scuttled the idea.

The Horse of the Year vote is a bit more problematic. I do have a vote, and I know who I'm going to vote for, but it's probably a bit unfair to publish that before the fact. Once the voting deadline has passed, then it's full disclosure time. Suffice to say that both mares are good enough to win in an average year.

There are several other championship categories that are even less clear cut. Champion 3yo colt is pretty clear, as are, obviously, 3yo filly and older mare. Just about every other category, however, lacks a definitive, clear leader. Sure, Zensational is probably the favorite for sprinter, She Be Wild for juvenile filly, and Lookin at Lucky for 2yo colt, but none are a certainty with Kodiak Kowboy, Hot Dixie Chick and Buddy's Saint probably getting lots of votes in those categories. Gio Ponti seems obvious for turf male, but Presious Passion won some votes in the BC Turf, and Conduit will probably get a few as well. Older male is a complete mess. Gio Ponti probably earned some votes in the BC Classic, but who else really proved he's worth a vote? Was Midday impressive enough in the Filly and Mare Turf to win?

All in all, it's actually one of the most interesting Eclipse Award ballots in years.

End of hiatus

2009-11-27T14:33:00.006-06:00

It has been a long month. It's also been a short month.

You know how it goes--sometimes when there's too much to do in a week or a month, it seems to take forever when it's happening, but then seems to have flown by after it's over. That was my November. Three different writing deadlines that overlapped Breeders' Cup and Keeneland November.

Then came the fun part--the birth of my first grandson Eli on November 13 (adorable photo above). That, of course, required a visit to Chicago to get to know the little guy.

Suddenly the month is almost gone and I've posted nothing to this blog. Somehow I trust no one has lost any sleep over that. I haven't.

But I should have time now to resume posting on a more regular basis. Right now I'm looking forward to the running of today's Clark Handicap at Churchill. That race might well resolve the contest for champion older male with Macho Again, Einstein and Bullsbay in the field. And for whom do you vote if Blame beats all three of them? Gio Ponti might have something to say about that.

Back to work!

The name game

2009-10-12T16:26:00.012-05:00

I have never found another breeder or owner as consistently clever at naming his horses as was the late Alfred G. Vanderbilt Jr., but Maria Niarchos-Gouaze has surpassed herself with her name for her current star two-year-old Eightfold Path, who won the Prix Eclipse today in France.

Eightfold Path, who was winning for the second time in three starts in the Eclipse, after finishing third in the Prix de la Rochette a few weeks ago, is the first foal of the Niarchos family's French champion 2- and 3-year-old filly Divine Proportions, by Kingmambo. For those who did not study Renaissance art, Divine Proportions is another name for the golden ratio, a mathematical-philosophical concept that has influenced great art at least since classical Greece. You can click on the link to read the way-too-complicated Wikipedia explanation, but basically, artistic representations based on the divine proportions are believed to be more aesthetically pleasing, and indeed artists have been using the golden ratio as a template at least since Phidias carved the friezes of the Parthenon.

Eightfold Path's sire, Giant's Causeway, is named for one of the natural wonders of Ireland, a volcanic basalt formation near Bushmills, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, that looks something like a giant staircase leading into the ocean. According to Irish legend, mythical Irish giant hero Finn McCool built the Giant's Causeway as a pathway to Scotland. In fact, the other end of the formation crops up at Fingal's Cave on Staffa Island off the coast of Scotland.

According to the teachings of Buddha, the Noble Eightfold Path is basically the path to enlightenment or awakening, one of the Buddha's four noble truths. With all that arcane knowledge--obviously possessed by Mme. Niarchos-Gouaze--the path, as it were, from Divine Proportions along the Giant's Causeway to the Eightfold Path is, well, clever, erudite, charming, and (I can't resist) just divine.

For me, the best names have always been those that incorporate the meaning of both the sire's and dam's name in a clever, euphonious, meaningful, and--if possible--humorous way. Alfred Vanderbilt still holds the title for the all-time best in the humorous category, naming his otherwise forgettable 1968 colt (later, sadly, gelded) by Tom Fool out of Last Leg, by Native Dancer, ....wait for it....Dirty Old Man.

Vanderbilt, of course, gave great names to far more famous horses, including Social Outcast (Shut Out--Pansy, by *Sickle) (hey, it was the '50s) and Native Dancer himself (Polynesian--Geisha, by Discovery).

So what's your favorite name?

More Stars

2009-10-05T07:56:00.006-05:00

Thanks to Sid Fernando for pointing out that video of the 2009 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe was already up on Youtube yesterday....I added a link to my original post on the victory of Sea The Stars, but I also went back and looked at the race again. The Youtube version is actually far better than the live feed on HRTV.

Looking at the race again did not change my opinion of Sea The Stars at all, but it did let me see some aspects of the race I had not been able to see on HRTV, aspects which confirmed my previous opinion in a couple of different ways. The first thing I noticed is what a truly rare feat Sea The Stars performed about 250 meters from the finish. Mick Kinane has maneuvered Sea The Stars off the rail and he is rallying between Stacelita and Dar Re Mi. He is moving fastest of the three, but visually only very slightly faster than Dar Re Mi. If he had maintained that pace, he would likely have finished perhaps a length ahead of Dar Re Mi...which would mean he would have been in a photo finish with the placed horses.

At that point, however, Dar Re Mi, who is drifting in, bumps Sea The Stars slightly, and actually pushes him slightly off balance. His response is dramatic and electrifying. As Kinane throws a cross at him, Sea The Stars visibly throws in an extra effort, an emphatic jump to the right and forward, and he accelerates a second time, and within five strides is three lengths in front. You can see for yourself here during the live action at about the 2:15 minute mark. The best view, however, is the close-up, head-on view at about the 6:50 mark.

This is not the first time, Sea The Stars has accelerated a second time to win a race. Watch what he has to do to beat Rip Van Winkle, the best horse he has faced, in the Eclipse Stakes in July. At about the 3:50 mark, Sea The Stars has already accelerated once to take the lead. Rip Van Winkle, coming from a couple of lengths behind, closes to within a neck or half-length at the furlong pole, but Sea The Stars accelerates again to win by a little more than a length.

That ability to accelerate twice is very rare, and, for me, confirms Sea The Stars's place in the 140 Timeform class.

The other thing I wanted to see in the Youtube replay was exactly what happened to Youmzain and Conduit, the second and fourth. In truth, both overcame trips that were actually worse, in terms of position and route, than that of Sea The Stars. Conduit is the horse in the white silks who is alongside Sea The Stars on his outside for most of the trip. Youmzain is the horse in blue and white who is directly behind Sea The Stars for most of the race. At the top of the stretch, however, Sea The Stars gets through on the inside, Conduit goes widest of all, and Youmzain splits one horse inside of Conduit.

Basically Sea The Stars turned into the stretch alongside Conduit and about two lengths in front of Youmzain. He accelerated more quickly and took the shorter route home, but ended up about the same distance in front of Youmzain as he had been 2 1/2 furlongs earlier.

In terms of absolute form, you simply can't get away from this fact. Look back at the 2008 Arc when Zarkava beat Youmzain by two lengths. Zarkava's run is nowhere near as visually impressive as Sea The Stars, but notice how Youmzain, who enters the stretch several lengths in front of her, gets trapped on the rail and has to come around fading horses late. He should have finished closer, but would never have beaten Zarkava.

I am in no way implying that Zarkava was as good as Sea The Stars. Her 133 Timeform rating, (equivalent of 136 for a colt) fully reflects her ability relative to Youmzain, who is an extremely reliable yardstick. But my point remains. If Zarkava only ran to a 136 equivalent beating Youmzain last year, why is Sea The Stars victory over the same horse worth more this year?

Well, in my book, it IS worth more, mostly because of the way Sea The Stars pulled for the first half mile, but don't tell me he had a harder trip than Youmzain or Conduit, because he didn't. I'd still rank him at 140.

And by the way, Tony C....I always thought Dancing Brave was slightly overrated. Equal to Vaguely Noble who beat Sir Ivor by three lengths in the 1968 Arc? Two pounds better than Nijinsky II? I don't think so!

UPDATE:

Here's an interesting viewpoint on the subject of Sea The Stars's place in history from Sam Walker of the Racing Post.

Stars shines in the Arc

2009-10-04T14:01:00.008-05:00

Sea The Stars was typically brilliant in the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe today, but it might be interesting to evaluate his performance strictly on form lines once again. The question is what is the form worth on paper and how much credit should he get for the considerable difficulty—partly created by his own behavior—of his trip.

Sea The Stars won by two lengths, with Youmzain, Cavalryman, and Conduit heads apart in second, third, and fourth. Dar Re Mi finished fifth, about 3 ½ lengths behind the winner, a length in front of Fame and Glory in sixth.

It was the third straight year that the 6-year-old Youmzain has finished second in the Arc. Last year he was rated 131 by Timeform, his highest career rating, and there is no reason to believe that he should be rated any higher this year. The Arc was his fifth start of the year, and, though he has run consistently well, he has not won a race in 2009.

Cavalryman won the Juddmonte Grand Prix de Paris in June and the principal French Arc prep, the Prix Niel, three weeks ago. I do not have a current copy of Timeform's weekly “black book” ratings, but it is impossible to imagine him being rated any higher than 130 on his previous performances.

Conduit has repeatedly proven his class, winning the St. Leger and Breeders' Cup Turf last year and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes this year. Timeform rated him at 130 last year, and it is likely he might be rated a couple of pounds higher this year, but no more.

Dar Re Mi was rated only 119 last year, but has clearly improved at four, enough to be rated around 128, while Fame And Glory's previous performances would have earned him a rating around 130-132.

So, Sea The Stars beat three horses rated in the 130-132 range by two lengths, with two others also close to that range a bit further behind at one-length intervals. As with his previous best performances, on paper, that should equate to a maximum rating of around 135 to 136.

Two factors, however, lead one to believe that he should be rated several pounds higher. Ballydoyle's two pacemakers went off at a cracking pace, trying to sap Sea The Stars's stamina and set the race up for Fame And Glory. The riders on the good horses, however, ignored them, as indeed they should have, meaning that French Oaks winner Stacelita (who would have preferred softer ground) was the nominal leader, just ahead of the rest of the pack. The modest pace Stacelita set, however, meant that Sea The Stars was running over horses for the first half mile of the race, fighting jockey Mick Kinane and throwing his head about, trying to adjust his exceptionally high cruising speed to what amounted to a fairly slow pace for a race of this caliber.

Fighting the jockey for a half mile would sap the finishing speed of a normal high-class horse. Sea The Stars is not a normal high-class horse. At Longchamp, the field almost always fans out when the horses turn into the final straight about 2 ½ furlongs from home. Still, Kinane was extremely lucky that the race played out in this typical manner, and he easily found a seam for Sea The Stars.
Sea The Stars has repeatedly proven he can run a quarter mile in under 23 seconds at any stage of a race, and that is simply faster than any other European horse in training. He went about two lengths up with a furlong remaining, and basically cruised the rest of the way.

There is no doubt at all that Sea The Stars could have won by a wider margin if Kinane had driven him out to the post, but the question for form readers—and indeed for history—is how much wider? A length? Two lengths? Three? It is impossible to know, so one has to guess. For me, I could not go any higher than 140, and even that is a bit of a stretch.

Take a look at the race here and decide for yourself

The most recent European-trained horse rated that highly is Dancing Brave, who earned a 140 rating in 1986, and, indeed, their records are very similar. Dancing Brave defeated the previously unbeaten Bering (who finished the race with a cracked knee) by two lengths (officially 1 ½, but clearly more than that) in that Arc. Like Sea The Stars, he had lost only once previously, when his jockey Greville Starkey, who did not believe Dancing Brave would stay 1 ½ miles, anchored him at the back of the field in the Epsom Derby and his brilliant finishing speed could not quite catch Shahrastani.

Dancing Brave beat Shahrastani (130) in the 1 1/2-mile King George when ridden more intelligently by Pat Eddery, and Shahrastani finished fourth in the Arc, beaten 4 lengths. Bering was rated 136, and Triptych, who finished third in the Arc, 132.
Sea The Stars is the best horse trained in Europe since Dancing Brave, and, as such, probably is worth of a rating around 140. That is considerably higher than one can rate any horse who has run in America this year, including Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta. The one American performance that might arguably be in the same category is Rachel Alexandra's six-length defeat of Summer Bird in the Haskell, but the Monmouth track so consistently favors front runners that one has to take that margin with a large rock of salt.

Trainer John Oxx has always talked cautiously of running Sea The Stars in the Breeders' Cup Classic. If he does run, and if he handles the synthetic track at Santa Anita, he would not have to be at his very best to beat his American foes. Only Rip Van Winkle, who gave Sea The Stars his only real scare this year in the Eclipse Stakes, looks like a worthy opponent.

Giant with a cause

2009-09-20T14:10:00.003-05:00

When the Thoroughbred market went south in the late 1980s, American breeders turned en masse against foreign-raced stallions. Despite the fact that both American and European sire lists had been dominated by European-raced horses in the 1980s, despite the fact that horses like Blushing Groom (Fr), Caro (Ire), Riverman, Lyphard, *Vaguely Noble, and Nijinsky II were among the most commercially successful stallions with the highest stud fees of the decade, American commercial breeders decided that the solution to their problems was to stop breeding to foreign-raced horses and concentrate on American sires who had raced primarily or exclusively on dirt.

As a result, the only really high-class, European-raced horse I can think of imported to these shores for the last 20 years or so is Giant's Causeway. And, no, North Light does not count. He was an Epsom Derby winner in a substandard year. Perhaps a reader with a better memory can remind me of another really top European runner given a chance at stud over here in the last two decades?

So who is currently the leading sire in America, whether by worldwide or North American earnings only? Giant's Causeway of course.
Giant's Causeway did have certain advantages. Since he was by Storm Cat out of an American Grade 2 winner, Mariah's Storm, by Rahy, he was perceived as having a “dirt” pedigree. The best 10-furlong horse of his year in Europe, he had also performed brilliantly in his lone appearance on dirt, beaten only a head by Tiznow in the 2000 Breeders' Cup Classic (G1) at Churchill Downs.

Giant's Causeway also has had the advantage of covering enormous books of mares at Ashford Stud in Kentucky. His current $3.5-million lead over Tiznow on the worldwide earnings list is partly due to the fact that as of September 20, 2009, he has 327 runners this year compared to 144 for Tiznow. Distorted Humor, who is third has 255, while Fusaichi Pegasus, another Ashford sire who is generally considered a failure in the U.S., is fourth (mostly due to his Australian-sired runners) with 327 runners as well.

Giant's Causeway has also benefited from the evolution of American racing surfaces. Of the $54-million his offspring have earned worldwide to date, $33-million (61%) has been earned on turf. His offspring have earned $5.6-million of the remaining $21-million on synthetic surfaces. Thus, Giant's Causeway's progeny have earned 71.5% of their total earnings on surfaces other than dirt.

That certainly looks like a rock-solid confirmation that Giant's Causeway is not a dirt sire, but it may also be the result of something akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Owners and trainers expect the Giant's Causeways to be better on surfaces other than dirt and give them more opportunities on those surfaces.
What breeders, trainers and everyone else appear to have forgotten is that a truly top-class horse is usually a top-class horse on any surface. Yes, any horse can have slight preferences for firm going instead of soft, grass instead of dirt, synthetics, or any possible combination. But as a general rule, the differences are not that great, and most good horses will learn to adapt given the opportunity. With a wide range of opportunities these days, one cannot blame trainers for trying to run their horses on the surface they think is the very best for him.

Breeders have also forgotten that throughout the history of American breeding top-class European-raced horses have repeatedly transformed the American Thoroughbred. Imported sires dominated American sire lists for decades until Americans basically stopped breeding to them in the late 1980s.

Last week at the Keeneland September yearling sale, I asked a prominent European buyer why he had all but stopped buying in America. The answer was simple. Current European sires—Galileo, Montjeu, Pivotal, Oasis Dream, Monsun, Dansili—are simply better than current American sires. Their offspring do not require drugs to run. They produce a higher percentage of Grade 1 winners. And they win in America, while American-sired horses seldom win major races in Europe anymore.

Thirty years ago, Claiborne Farm, Gainesway, and other American breeding farms would have been in hot pursuit of Europe's current wonder horse Sea The Stars.

Does anyone believe they have any real interest these days?

Seeing Stars?

2009-09-07T08:18:00.004-05:00

2009 may be the year of Rachel Alexandra in the U.S., but many European pundits believe they also have an all-time great on the scene in Sea The Stars. The handsome Cape Cross colt scored his fifth consecutive Group 1 win of the season on Saturday, beating Irish Derby winner Fame and Glory in the Irish Champion S.

The Irish Champion was Sea The Stars's seventh consecutive victory in his eight starts—he finished a green fourth in his first start behind two subsequent stakes winners and this year's Dante S. second.

Each of Sea The Stars's seven wins has been characterized by an ability to cruise along behind the leaders and then unleash a dramatic, decisive turn of foot in the final furlong. The Irish Champion was no different. Aidan O'Brien has been trying to beat Sea The Stars all season and he threw two pacemakers and two of his three best 3-year-olds at Sea The Stars on Saturday.

The pacemakers set a very fast pace over yielding ground with Ballydoyle's 2008 champion juvenile and '09 dual Group 1 winner Mastercraftsman cruising in third. On the turn, Johnny Murtaugh moved Ballydoyle's first string, Fame and Glory up on the outside of Sea The Stars with the obvious intention of getting first run and testing the champion's stamina to the fullest.

It didn't matter...Mick Kinane on Sea The Stars merely followed Fame and Glory through, then simply sprinted past with 100 yards to go, winning by 2 ½ lengths. The performance reminded me a lot of Sir Ivor's performances in the 1968 Epsom Derby and Washington D.C. International. In each case, the winner made some of the fastest horses in the world look slow with a remarkable turn of foot.

That ability to accelerate in a stride or two at the end of a race and produce an 11-second furlong is very rare and it is always visually impressive. But what does it actually mean in terms of form? British turf writers are comparing Sea The Stars favorably to *Sea-Bird and Brigadier Gerard, the two highest-rated horses in the history of the authoritative Timeform ratings. *Sea-Bird earned a 145 (pounds) rating in 1965 and Brigadier Gerard was rated 144 in 1972. *Tudor Minstrel also received a 144 in 1947, but that is apparently so long ago that no one cares anymore, or perhaps everyone but us curmudgeons has forgotten.

Brigadier Gerard won 17 of 18 starts from 1970-72, beaten only by Roberto under an all time great ride by Braulio Baeza in the '72 Benson and Hedges Gold Cup. In the 1972 2,000 Guineas, Brigadier Gerard beat another all-time great, Mill Reef, by three lengths. Mill Reef, who needed a longer distance to be at his very best, was rated 141 by Timeform.

*Sea-Bird won 7 of 8 starts in 1964-65 with a visually impressive style very similar to that of Sea The Stars. In the 1965 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, *Sea-Bird beat Reliance by six lengths with *Diatome five lengths further away third, accumulating all of that record-equaling margin in the last furlong and a half with a devastating turn of speed. Reliance had won all of his previous races including the French Derby, and *Diatome subsequently scored a comfortable victory in the D.C. International. Timeform rated Reliance 137, Diatome 132.

It is clear from those details that *Sea-Bird and Brigadier Gerard earned their high ratings through performance, but, realistically, what kind of rating has Sea The Stars actually earned this year? In succession, he has beaten Delegator by 1 ½ lengths in the 2,000 Guineas, Fame and Glory by 1 ¾ lengths in the Epsom Derby-G1, Rip van Winkle by a length in the Eclipse, Mastercraftsman by a length in the Juddmonte International, and Fame and Glory by 2 ½ lengths at Leopardstown.
Those are all good horses, and worthy classic horses in an average year, but with the possible, marginal exception of Rip van Winkle, does anyone really believe that any of those horses he has beaten is worth much more than 132 or 133 on the Timeform scale?

No, I didn't think so.

Clearly, Sea The Stars is a great racehorse, the best we have seen in Europe in more than a decade, but *Sea-Bird? The Brigadier? Mill Reef? Not yet anyway. On paper at least, he has consistently produced a performance worth somewhere between about 134 and 138 on the Timeform scale, where a length translates into about 2 pounds. That's in the Timeform ballpark occupied by such as Nijinsky II and *Vaguely Noble, which is heady enough territory for almost any horse.

Consistency is admirable, but it is not the same thing as absolute, all-time great ability. The all-time greats, the *Sea-Birds, the *Ribots (Timeform 142), the Secretariats, are capable of completely running away from rivals who have proven themselves to be racehorses of the 132 to 135 class on the Timeform scale.

Good as he is, Sea The Stars has not yet done that.

They don't call me the Pedigree Curmudgeon for nothing.

It depends on what "is" is

2009-09-03T20:05:00.008-05:00

Every time a yearling by Tiznow came into the sales ring during the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale of selected yearlings, announcer Terrence Collier repeated that Tiznow was then the leading sire in North America.

Well, that depends on your definition of “North America.”

No, I am not being Clintonesque here.

Collier was quoting the general sire list published on the website of the Blood-Horse magazine. The question is, exactly what is that sire list based on? Which countries' race results are included in that list? The United States and Canada? Mexico? Puerto Rico? Any other countries?

The Blood-Horse website does not tell you, but unless their standards have changed in the last few years, their “North American” sire list includes money earned in the five major European racing countries (England, Ireland France, Germany, Italy), plus the United Arab Emirates....but not Japan or other major racing venues. (Presumably the standards are listed in the weekly magazine sire lists, but the author is not a subscriber, so perhaps one of our readers can enlighten us?).

In fact, there is no way that Tiznow could have been atop the North American sire list at that point without the earnings of Well Armed in the Dubai World Cup-G1. In fact, if one restricts the sire list to earnings in North America only (U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico, but not Mexico), then Tiznow currently stands in 20th place on the North American sire list, and could not possibly have been in first place the second week in August.

The Thoroughbred Times website is at least more informative. (Full disclosure—the author still works part time for Thoroughbred Times and is certainly biased in their favor). Giant's Causeway stands almost $3-million clear of Tiznow, who ranks second on that list (and indeed Giant's Causeway was well clear at the time of the Saratoga sale on the Thoroughbred Times list), which is based on earnings in North America, plus 17 other countries, including Japan. The Thoroughbred Times list includes earnings in all 18 countries (including the US) for which the Jockey Club database includes complete racing data.

At the very least, that is a far more logical approach than the Blood-Horse's inclusion of only North America, Europe and the UAE. Both magazines began including Europe in the late 1980s as the data became available. Everybody added the UAE when Cigar won the first Dubai World Cup in 1996. How could you possibly not include the complete earnings of the all-time leading American-trained money-earner?

The Blood-Horse decided, however, that they would not include Japanese earnings even when they became readily available. Supposedly the rationale at the time was that Japanese purses were so high that they would in some way “skew” the results.

Bullhockey!

I fail to see the logic of including some purses that are markedly higher than North American purses (as in Dubai) and excluding others (namely Japan). It seems to me the only argument concerning a leading North American sire list should be whether one includes only earnings in North America or one includes everything available.
One can argue either side of that question, but I have yet to see a valid argument for anything in between.

For the record (courtesy of Thoroughbred Times database...It's available, but they don't run it on their website), here are the current top ten sires by North American earnings only, as of 9/3/09:

Sire Strs Wnrs SWs Total Earnings
Giant's Causeway 142 62 11 $5,886,465
A.P. Indy 126 62 13 5,710,951
Medaglia d'Oro 95 43 7 5,647,349
Distorted Humor 217 108 11 5,500,685
Smart Strike 193 78 10 5,141,563
Stormy Atlantic 234 99 13 4,638,666
Unbridled's Song 153 61 9 4,623,808
Tale of the Cat 201 88 8 4,535,586
Birdstone 50 24 4 4,302,615
Malibu Moon 205 84 10 4,149,495
Empire Maker 100 47 4 3,985,213
Yes It's True 219 120 4 3,971,007
Northern Afleet 204 113 4 3,888,482
Dynaformer 111 45 6 3,795,177
Yonaguska 171 91 5 3,781,409
Unusual Heat 130 61 7 3,727,213
Pulpit 153 68 6 3,707,677
Lemon Drop Kid 115 66 12 3,658,110
Not For Love 196 87 8 3,657,464
Tiznow 125 54 6 3,600,042

Cultural bias

2009-08-30T19:38:00.004-05:00

If they both retired to stud tomorrow, which horse would command the higher stud fee, Summer Bird or Quality Road?

The correct answer is Quality Road. Why? Well it is mostly based on industry biases and seemingly permanent, almost willful misconceptions about what is important in determining the stud potential of top colts.

Remember five years ago when Smarty Jones and Birdstone retired to stud? Smarty had won a minor stakes at two, the Kentucky Derby-G1 on a bad track that blatantly favored runners near the front of the pack, and the Preakness-G1 at three. Birdstone had won a G1 (the Champagne) at two, beaten Smarty Jones in the Belmont-G1 and won the Travers-G1 at three. Smarty Jones began his stud career at a stud fee of $100,000. Birdstone started off at $10,000.

Both were rather small, unimpressive individuals, correct enough, but not physical specimens who would have brought high prices at yearling or juvenile sales, regardless of their pedigrees. Three Chimneys had a waiting list for Smarty Jones, despite his high stud fee, but Gainesway struggled to fill Birdstone's book. Eighty-five foals resulted for Smarty's first crop versus only 70 for Birdstone.

True, part of the reason for the discrepancy in stud fee and book size was Smarty Jones's popularity with the racing public. The main reason, though, was pedigree. Smarty was from Elusive Quality's first crop, and the latter was a beautifully bred horse who had made himself a salable entity, mainly because of Smarty. Birdstone was by Grindstone, a better racehorse than Elusive Quality, but a proven failure at stud, Birdstone excepted. Birdstone possessed the better female family, but breeders did not care. Though not everyone was sold on Smarty's potential, breeders were willing to take a chance, banking on his presumed commercial appeal.

The results, of course, speak for themselves. Smarty's first crop includes, to date, only two minor stakes winners. Birdstone's first crop features five stakes winners, including two of the three best 3yo colts of the year, Summer Bird and Mine That Bird. In retrospect, Birdstone had everything breeders should require--except an impressive physique--in a stallion prospect...mainly his race record. He was a Grade 1 winner at two and a classic winner and Travers winner at 3. What more should one want? (Full disclosure--the author turned down Birdstone for a client's mare, despite an excellent pedigree match because of his size and unimpressive physique. He has since come to his senses).

Since then, of course, Elusive Quality has sired Raven's Pass and other top runners, confirming his quality as a stallion. Quality Road is a big, impressive individual from a very high-class family, and he has established track records at both 6 1/2 and 9 furlongs. Summer Bird is a good-looking, medium-sized horse, unraced at two, who has won two of the four most important races for three-year-olds and is from the same family as top sires Relaunch and Tapit. Either of these colts may yet go on to secure the 3yo male championship and earn a more lucrative stud career, but right now, Quality Road would be the choice of most breeders because he is perceived as the horse with superior speed.

Life just is not fair, whether one speaks of racehorses or of men. But which horse will have the higher stud fee in 2010, Smarty Jones or Birdstone?

Let's be honest about it

2009-08-28T10:19:00.005-05:00

It has been a difficult month.

The cliché about death and taxes has been too true of late. We've had too much of the former and face too much of the latter on receivables that haven't even been collected yet due to the economic recession, presumably. Time to move on.

Let's see....several recent events that deserve comment.

Yes, the Saratoga select sale was up, but the results were a bit deceiving...though happily so. The catalog—meaning both the pedigrees and the individuals—were at least 30% better than in 2008, but average price rose only 10%. Does that mean that the level of the market was actually down 20%?

Well, that's probably not fair. In a sense it's not even fair to compare the two sales. Fasig-Tipton's new ownership made a new beginning at Saratoga with their renovations to the area behind the pavilion and recruitment of a more international catalog and buyers bench. Consignors sensed something positive was happening and sent better horses with better pedigrees, and more of them.

Saratoga 2009 proved that in a shrinking market a boutique sale could work once again. The line for entries to the 2010 sale is already forming. The danger for Fasig-Tipton will be the temptation to take too many horses too soon. Give it time. Give it room to breathe and grow naturally.

One small incident on the last day of the sale bothered me a bit. Fasig-Tipton put Man o' War on the cover and used his image and reputation in their advertising. There is only one small problem with that. Man o' War was sold at Saratoga, but not by Fasig-Tipton. I knew that at least some FT officials knew that to be true, and when I mentioned the fact to Dan Pride, the company's new chief operating officer, he agreed and pointed out that nowhere in the advertising, etc., did it say that the horse was sold by Fasig-Tipton. He implied that any misconception was in the eye of the beholder and was not the fault of the company. Well.....no.

I like Dan Pride, a fellow Tennessean, a lot. His presence has added a lot of energy and a focus on classy presentation to the company's sales.....but misleading advertising is not classy. Sorry my friend Dan, but I do not believe that kind of advertising is as classy as the product the company aspires to sell.

I like Rachel Alexandra a lot too, and she is obviously a very classy filly. Her time figures and margins of victory have proven that she might be a truly great filly. But the emphasis at this point should be on “might”. The rest of this crop of three-year-old fillies is clearly far short of inspiring. None of the top three-year-old colts have yet faced their elders, so it is impossible to say with any certainty at this point just how much credit she should get for a six-length beating of Summer Bird.

The rush by much of the racing press to crown her as an all-time great, therefore, is a bit embarrassing. Is racing so desperate for heroes that we have to over-hype every good horse that comes along? (For example....Curlin—truly not picking on Jess Jackson here, pure happenstance of ownership) Unrealistic, excessive press is just as bad as no press at all. It sets up the public for one more huge disappointment if Rachel Alexandra ever falls short of those unrealistic expectations.

But if comparisons to Ruffian or even Dark Mirage and Desert Vixen are premature, it is clear she is a very good filly. Racing should certainly take advantage, as best we can, of her brilliance, but, I would offer the same advice to racing's promoters I'd offer Dan Pride (equally unsolicited).

Let's be honest about it.

The sire of sires effect

2009-07-29T10:14:00.005-05:00

I rarely participate in discussions on internet bulletin boards. In part that is a holdover from the time when I was a full-time employee of Thoroughbred Times. Anything I said at that time could have been interpreted as representing Thoroughbred Times, and that would not do at all, so I simply never commented, even in cases of factual error.

Three-plus years into the semi-retirement it is nice to feel the freedom implicit in “freelance”. I am still not inclined to comment frequently in online forums, whether on Thoroughbred racing or other obsessions, because too frequently they turn into flame wars that benefit no one.

Occasionally, however, the urge to correct factual errors or potentially misleading statements overpowers that probably wise reticence. One recent discussion on the tb_breeding_theory board on Yahoo brought me reluctantly out of my curmudgeon cave, brandishing facts.

The discussion began with a question about the comparative rarity of inbreeding to Northern Dancer through his daughters. That eventually led to a broad generalization by one member (a good guy who I doubt intended it the way it came out) that implied that great sires of sires, including Northern Dancer, were not good broodmare sires.
Since I knew the inference that might be drawn from that statement was untrue, I felt duty-bound to step into the fray, and produced the following lists of the accomplishments as broodmare sires of some of the sires mentioned (the sires of sires are in bold face, the produce of their daughters in red--damn I hate that I don't know HTML code!):

Phalaris Among leading BMS England
Picture Play 1,000 Guineas, great foundation broodmare
Mid-day Sun Epsom Derby, champion 3yo
Godiva Epsom Oaks, 1,000 Guineas, ch 3yo filly
Windsor Slipper Undefeated Irish Triple Crown winner, ch 2yo, 3yo
Emborough Leading sire Australia
Delville Wood Leading sire Australia
Enfield Among leading sires Australia
Brown Betty 1,000 Guineas
Sind Leading sire Argentina
*Easton Coronation Cup, good sire
Plassy Good SW, sire of Vandale
Burudun Leading sire Argentina

Nearco Leading BMS England 3 times, leading BMS France
*Prince Taj Leading sire in France twice
Rising Flame Leading BMS Japan, among leading sires Japan
*Arctic Prince Epsom Derby, good sire
Averof Leading sire South Africa
Tamerlane St. James's Palace S., Grandsire of Monsun
Count Rendered Among leading sires NZ
*Khorassan II Among leading sires Aus/NZ
*Miralgo Champion 2yo England
*Tulyar Epsom Derby, St. Leger, champion 3yo
Saint Crespin III Arc, among leading sires England
Forest Row Leading broodmare sire Chile
*Vaguely Noble Arc, leading sire England
Charlottesville French Derby, Leading sire England
Sheshoon Ascot Gold Cup, Leading sire France
*Aggressor II King George VI and Queen Elizabeth S.
Ambergris Irish Oaks,
*Rose Royale II 1,000 Guineas, ch. 3yo filly
Sybil's Nephew Leading sire South Africa
Test Case ch. 2yo colt England, among leading sires NZ

*Nasrullah among leading BMS US 5 times
Boucher St. Leger
Poker Broodmare sire of Seattle Slew, Silver Charm
Turkish Trousers ch. 3yo filly
Tell Sire of good NZ sire Pompeii Court
Talking Picture ch. 2yo filly, great broodmare
Pakistan Leading sire NZ
Hornbeam Leading BMS England
*Sovereign champion 2yo filly England
Lacquer Irish 1,000 Guineas
Drumtop Great turf filly, dam of Topsider

Bold Ruler among the leading BMS US twice (7 champions, 119 SW)
Christmas Past champion 3yo filly
Intrepid Hero Hollywood Derby, United Nations H.
Sovereign Dancer Among leading sires, sire of Louis Quatorze, Gate Dancer
Quick as Lightning 1,000 Guineas
Posse St. James's Palace S., good sire in England
Intrepidity Epsom Oaks, Prix Vermeille
Autobiography Champion older horse
Targowice Leading sire France
Home Guard 2nd leading BMS Italy, good sire

Northern Dancer Leading BMS US (5 champions, 159 SW)
Tap Dance City Takarazuka Kinen, $9.5-million
Vega champion 3yo filly Japan
Muhtarram champion older horse, underrated sire
Eillo Breeders' Cup Sprint
Silk Prima Donna Japanese Oaks
Ryafan champion turf mare
Rhythm champion 2yo colt,
Not for Love good Maryland sire
Arazi champion 2yo
Noverre champion miler
Aptitude champion older horse
L'Enjoleur Canadian HOTY
Southern Halo 8-time leading sire Argentina, sire of More Than Ready
L'Alezane Canadian HOTY
Narita Brian Japanese Triple Crown winner
Ravinella 1,000 Guineas
Signal Tap Successful sire in Brazil
Nedawi St. Leger, among leading sires Brazil

Bold Ruler excepted, all those horses rank among the greatest broodmare sires of the 20th century. They were not, on the other hand, particularly successful as
broodmare sires of sires....at least not in the obvious sense. If you read over those lists, you will notice that all of them sired the dams of leading sires--just not in areas where their own sons were dominant sires. For example, the only great sire out of a Northern Dancer mare is Southern Halo, who was dominant in Argentina, but, More Than Ready excepted, failed in the US. Only one Northern Dancer-line horse (the mostly moderate Oak Dancer) has ever led the Argentine sire list.

So what might account for that fact? It seems logical that when a sire becomes accepted as a great sire of sires and large numbers of his sons go to stud in a given area, those sons make it very difficult for sons of daughters of that same sire of sires to gain any traction as sires. For example, Northern Dancer had so many great sons at stud that breeding those sons to sires out of daughters of Northern Dancer would create inbreeding closer than most breeders are willing to accept.

On the other hand, in a breeding area where sons of that sire of sires have not penetrated the gene pool, there is room, as it were, for the genetic influence of the sire of sires to be passed on through his daughters. Thus, Southern Halo could become a dominant factor in Argentina, a country where male-line descendants have enjoyed markedly less success than almost anywhere else on the globe.

I'm not sure myself exactly what I think of this hypothesis. It's something I'll be mulling in the nether reaches of the brain stem for awhile, but, if true, the implications are obvious for stallion importers in regional markets.

Vuillier and the Triple Crown

2009-07-08T11:24:00.006-05:00

Before they proved they were top-class runners, the pedigrees of the three winners of America's 2009 Triple Crown races would not have been described as fashionable. Indeed, Mine That Bird famously sold for only $9,500 as a yearling, while neither Rachel Alexandra or Summer Bird were offered at public auction.
Fashion be damned. As shown by the data below (please forgive my ignorance of how to make the columns come out neatly in HTML code), their pedigrees are actually well within the norm of contemporary top-class pedigrees.

Archetype Mine That Bird Rachel Alexandra Summer Bird
Blue Larkspur(100) 56 88 104
Bold Ruler(157) 128 128 128
Buckpasser(108) 32 0 160
Hail to Reason(94) 0 256 0
*Mahmoud(118) 104 168 152
Man o' War(116) 108 132 168
Mr. Prospector(256)640 256 128
*Nasrullah(243) 240 144 208
Native Dancer(199)352 224 256
Nearco(279) 280 280 288
Northern Dancer(296) 512 512 640
Phalaris(178) 170 218 164
Plucky Liege(118) 111 148 125
*Princequillo(151) 144 160 192
*Ribot(75) 0 192 0
Seattle Slew(120) 0 0 0
War Admiral(85) 60 56 136

The data presented above are based on research by the author on a new implementation of the Vuillier dosage system published in the December 13, 2008 issue of Thoroughbred Times. The dosage numbers in parentheses represent the average genetic contribution of the archetypes listed to the pedigrees of the winners of the most important races in America since the institution of the Breeders' Cup in 1984. (You can read the article by clicking on the link titled “A new understanding of Vuillier dosage” on the right hand side of the page.) The numbers in the three unfortunately jagged columns are the dosages of the same archetypes in the pedigrees of Mine That Bird, Rachel Alexandra and Summer Bird.
The archetypes chosen for display here are actually the ones that produce the most varied dosages among these three pedigrees—their pedigrees are virtually identical on the other most significant influences on contemporary pedigrees. Indeed they are close to identical on a few of the archetypes included here as examples, like Bold Ruler, Nearco and Seattle Slew.
Naturally the widest variations in dosage are on the youngest archetypes listed, like Buckpasser, Hail to Reason, Mr. Prospector, Northern Dancer, *Ribot and Seattle Slew. That is the way pedigrees work. The genetic influence of the most significant sires and dams gradually stabilizes as time passes and their names recede further into the background of pedigrees.
The Vuillier system, though, gives a holistic view of pedigrees and offers tremendous insight into the direction one should take with matings.
For example, the pedigrees of Rachel Alexandra and Summer Bird are complementary in many ways. Rachel is above the norm in Hail to Reason, *Mahmoud, Phalaris, Plucky Liege and *Ribot, while Summer Bird is either below the norm or at least lower than Rachel in all five of those influences. Conversely, Summer Bird is high in Blue Larkspur, Buckpasser, Man o' War and *Princequillo, while Rachel's pedigree is less saturated with those powerful influences.
In a conventional pedigree presentation, it is easy to see that both Rachel Alexandra and Summer Bird have plenty of Northern Dancer and Mr. Prospector in their pedigrees, but it is simply impossible to see the imbalances in more distant but still vitally important ancestors. The Vuillier system makes those imbalances obvious.
The Vuillier system is based on the assumption that a mating that produces a pedigree more similar to the pedigree of the winners of the best races is more likely to produce another winner of those same races than one that does not. Indeed that is the same assumption behind other popular mating systems like nicking and even biomechanics (in an indirect way).
That is the beauty of the Vuillier system, and the implementation I devised with the help of Simon Morris at TesioPower and described in the linked article. It provides the ultimate in flexibility in applying those insights.

Ladies weekend?

2009-06-26T17:01:00.002-05:00

This weekend should belong to racing's leading ladies on both coasts.
Rachel Alexandra is set to run in the Mother Goose at Belmont Park and champion Zenyatta risks her unbeaten record under 129 pounds in the Vanity at Hollywood Park.
How many female potential racing fans know this? Has Thoroughbred racing, Belmont Park or Hollywood Park tried to reach sports-minded women and horse-loving young girls with ads?
Well, I don't live on either coast, so I can't answer that question myself, except to say that I have been watching Wimbledon on ESPN and haven't seen anything there. And if I did live in New York or California, past experience says I would see nothing directed at potential female fans there either. Heck the last time I went to a Breeders' Cup in New York (Tiznow, Fantastic Light, etc.), I didn't see a single ad on local TV advertising racing's championship event and barely any signage except right around the track. That did a lot of good.
There are a lot of reasons for the declining popularity of Thoroughbred racing, but there is absolutely no doubt that the sport's ineptitude at promoting itself ranks near the top of the list. Racing's powers that be killed perhaps the most effective ad in racing history (the original Lori Petty Go Baby Go ad), apparently because they thought Petty looked too much like a lesbian. They were a lot more comfortable with the painful Rip Torn ads that followed.
Rachel Alexandra in particular offers an opportunity to pull in female sports fans because she has already beaten the boys. We may live in a post-feminist world, but the battle between the sexes never ends, and women everywhere ALWAYS pay attention when a girl beats the boys at their own game—no matter what game it is.
If Thoroughbred racing is aware of this, I have seen no signs of it from my outpost here in the hinterlands of Tennessee. Anyone out there on the coasts seen any evidence?
Rachel Alexandra did racing a huge favor by winning the Preakness. Will that moment of glory be just another wasted opportunity?

Speed kills...but tactics win races

2009-06-20T14:23:00.001-05:00

Thoroughbred racing is not simply about which horse is the fastest—but that's a damned good headstart.
That is the lesson to be gleaned from the adventures of American trainer Wesley Ward at the just concluded Royal Ascot meeting. Ward took six horses to Ascot and ran them in seven races. He won a listed race and a Group 3, and finished second in a Group 1, earning a total of about $217,000.
Ward is something of a specialist with fast 2-year-olds and five of the six horses he took to England were juveniles. Ward is also a smart and observant man, and he perceived that European-trained horses simply are not trained to break from the gate as quickly as are American-trained runners.
Four of his five juvenile runners at Ascot had led from the start in their most recent starts in America. Those four had run the first quarter-mile of those races in :22.64 (Strike the Tiger), :21.70 (Jealous Again), :22.17 (Yogaroo), and :22.71 (Honor in Peace). The fifth, Aegean, had run the first quarter of her maiden victory on the lead in :22.14. European juveniles never go that fast at the start of their races.
Ward and American jockey John Velazquez reasoned that their horses would naturally outbreak their European counterparts, and if they let them run an American-style race, the European horses might be taken out of their game. If that happened, even with Ascot's uphill finish, the American horses could win.
It worked brilliantly for the first two juvenile races. Strike the Tiger led all the way in the five-furlong Windsor Castle Stakes on opening day, and Jealous Again simply scorched her opponents in the prestigious Queen Mary Stakes-G3 on day two, winning by five lengths.
European jockeys may not be one-trial learners, but they are not stupid. After those two lessons in early speed, they stayed closer to Ward's other three juvenile runners and swamped them in the end.
Ward's only older runner, the 4-year-old Cannonball, is a confirmed come-from-behind turf sprinter, a listed winner who has been narrowly beaten in Grade 3s—in other words, not a Grade 1 horse in America. Cannonball found himself well behind early in the five-furlong King's Stand S.-G1 on opening day, but, with Velazquez scrubbing on him practically from the spring of the latch, he finished with a purpose along the stands rail, winding up sixth, beaten about six lengths.
He ran much the same race in the six-furlong Golden Jubilee-G1 on closing day, hustled along at the back of the field from the start, but closing relentlessly all the way to the line to finish a neck second to Art Connoisseur.
Royal Ascot is the most prestigious race meeting in England and attracts the very best English, Irish, and (sometimes) French racehorses, but no one would have ranked any of Ward's horses anywhere near the top of their divisions in America. With the possible exception of Cannonball, the Ascot results did not change that perception.
So does this mean that—at least over sprint distances—the best American horses are that much better than the Europeans? Not so fast. Speed kills, but intelligent tactics can win races. All credit to Strike the Tiger and Jealous Again for being fast enough to run away from their opponents early in their races and brave enough to keep going up the final hill. Aegean, however, had beaten Jealous Again in the Kentucky Juvenile Stakes-G3, but she could never get away from her field at Ascot and was simply outrun at the finish. The European jockeys declined to be embarrassed again.
Still, Ward's triumphs—and the $217,000 he earned with what are probably second-rate horses—should encourage other American trainers to venture abroad with better horses. Americans have too long been spoiled by having higher purses than most of the rest of the world. Especially for top-level races, however, that is no longer true.
European, Dubaian, South African, and Australian trainers have raided valuable races all over the world for many years now with little to no opposition from American trainers. How much longer will American owners allow the Todd Pletchers, Bobby Frankels, and Steve Asmussens to ignore the money to be plundered abroad?

Amazing speed

2009-06-19T14:50:00.002-05:00

Did anyone else notice this rather interesting statement by trainer Aidan O'Brien from the June 19 issue of Thoroughbred Daily News in their story on the Yeats's fourth consecutive victory in the Ascot Gold Cup?
“He's very clever and has gone wise, but the boss [John Magnier] pointed out the other morning that, in his last work, he put in four 11 1/2-second furlongs one after another. When a stayer can do those times, all the class has to be there.” (www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/members/index.cfm, but you have to be a subscriber to read)
Four 11 ½-second furlongs. That equates to breezing a half in :46....without much doubt uphill (have you been to Ballydoyle?). And without any doubt whatsoever, not as fast as he could have gone that half mile if he had been asked for all his speed.
We're talking about an 8-year-old horse probably a week out from winning the world's greatest race for stayers, a race run over 2 ½ miles, for the fourth consecutive year. Breezing a half in :46 at Ballydoyle has got to be something like the equivalent of breezing a half in :45 over an American dirt or synthetic track. Again, we're talking about an 8-year-old horse that I guarantee you every American (and virtually all European) commercial breeders would dismiss as a plodder, simply because he won over 2 ½ miles.
Please explain to me why that attitude makes any sense at all in terms of genetics.

Do we have to go through this every year?

2009-06-18T14:17:00.002-05:00

Every year that passes without an American Triple Crown winner seems to amp up the criticism of the series. Trainers, pundits, owners....everyone seems to have ideas to “improve” the Triple Crown.
Why?
What is wrong with it as it stands?
The primary problem critics seem to have is that no horse has won it since Affirmed in 1978. Is that, in fact, a problem? Or is it an opportunity?
As racing's popularity has declined many within the sport seem to have fixated on a Triple Crown winner as an anodyne for the sport's problems. Why? How is a Triple Crown winner supposed to solve our problems? Yes, a triple hero (or heroine) would probably draw more television viewers to their subsequent performances for the remainder of their racing career. That period would likely extend, at most, another four months until that year's Breeders' Cup.
Any male winner (except possibly a gelding) of a Triple Crown would almost certainly retire at the end of their three-year-old season. Any female winner, well what else could she possibly accomplish by staying in training?
The racing world appears to believe (or perhaps just hope) a Triple Crown winner would serve the same function for racing that Tiger Woods serves for golf, Kobe Bryant or Lebron James for basketball, or Peyton Manning for football. Superstars sell tickets. But Woods, Bryant, James, and Manning can sell tickets (as well as shoes, cars, and soft drinks) largely because they have been superstars for many years. That simply is not going to happen with racehorses...except in extraordinarily rare cases like Yeats's four consecutive Ascot Gold Cups.
So, it seems probable that a Triple Crown winner could provide racing with a temporary publicity boost, but then what? Have the caretakers of the sport (such as they are) shown any marked ability to leverage the obvious assets we already have? How many times have the powers that be ignored or perverted the ideas of daring thinkers like Fred Pope? Would actually having a Triple Crown winner be a better marketing opportunity than the annual possibility and the obvious difficulty of the achievement are now. Racing has an opportunity to leverage those aspects every year, but they do not do so effectively.
So, if the value of a publicity boost seems to be overvalued, are their other valid reasons for supporting either of the two changes in the Triple Crown put forward most frequently: 1) increasing the intervals between the three races; or 2) reducing the distance of the Belmont Stakes.
America's Triple Crown has been crammed into a five-week interval in May and June for about 70 years. From 1919, when Sir Barton completed the first sweep of the Triple Crown until 1978, when Affirmed became the 11th Triple Crown winner, that was not a problem. Thousands of good, sound horses raced three times—or often more—within a five-week period, regardless of whether they were running in classics or not.
Not long after Affirmed retired, however, American training methods changed. Emphasis shifted to spacing races further apart and running the best horses only in the best races instead of allowance preps. Allowance races are MUCH tougher nowadays than they were 30 years ago as the average ability of the breed has improved. Trainers are MUCH more protective of their winning percentages since owners now pay closer attention to those statistics in choosing trainers.
There is no doubt at all that changes in training methods have made winning the Triple Crown more difficult. Against the same group 30 years ago, Mine That Bird might well have won the Triple Crown (if you take Rachel Alexandra out of the mix) since Dunkirk and Summer Bird would almost certainly have run in the Preakness as well.
I simply cannot agree with those who would shorten the Belmont. That argument is based mostly on fashion and a misunderstanding of genetics. Just because 1 ½ mile races are currently out of fashion does not mean they are not valid and valuable exercises for racing. The sport already suffers greatly from way too many races that look just alike and cover the same narrow, boring range of distances, so why get rid of something that is different and thus more interesting? Makes no sense.
Trainers in particular argue that the modern American racehorse is not bred to run 1 ½ miles. Truth is, any horse can run 1 ½ miles, it's just a question of how fast. And, in terms of genetics, even sprinters can (and not infrequently do) sire 1 ½ mile horses. It's all about probability, and there are still stamina genes in the Thoroughbred genotype. A certain—though admittedly diminished—percentage of the breed will always be able to carry their speed further than others. Why should we be averse to identifying the best of those horses?
So, yes, if you want to make the Triple Crown easier to win, spread the races out over the calendar, yes, even shorten the Belmont.....if you want to make it easier to win.
But why on earth would you want to do that?

Off to Ocala

2009-03-12T20:11:00.003-05:00

The first three juvenile sales of the year have done as well as could be expected. OBSC March may well do better than that. Obviously I haven't seen the horses yet, but over the last few years, the March sale has become something close to the 2yo sale equivalent of Keeneland September.

OBSC March is the biggest juvenile sale with a select group of individuals, and although the pedigrees are not as good, in general, as at Fasig-Tipton Calder, neither do the pinhookers have as much invested in the horses. Everyone knows now that a good horse can come from anywhere, and March has produced plenty of good ones lately, including, of course, Stardom Bound.

Buyers in general love the March sale because they feel like they have a chance to get a good horse for a (relatively--everything is relative in this business) inexpensive price. Sure, John Ferguson or his spotter Jimmy Gladwell will buy whatever they really want, but that will leave plenty of promising horses that don't fit the Darley pattern.

Although I love staying on the beach in Miami--what else do you think gets me through the winter in Tennessee--Ocala is fun in a different way. Everyone jokes about "Slocala", but in reality it's a nice, midsize town with decent enough amenities. It's a pleasant place to visit and I always look forward to seeing some new stallions while I'm there.

See you in Ocala!

What racing must do

2009-02-19T14:18:00.003-06:00

The news that Magna is likely to be forced into bankruptcy within the next few months hardly comes as a surprise. Like so many financial ventures of the last 35 years, Magna's business plan—to the extent they can be described as actually having had a viable business plan (hint: not much)--hinged on leveraging assets and growth. Magna certainly leveraged the assets. They did not get the growth.

Magna apparently perceived expansion as the route to growth, buying up racetracks in an early frenzy of acquisition. Most often, it seemed, they acquired those assets without any clear idea of how to make a profit from them—acquisition for acquisition's sake. But Magna's ideas of how to profit from their racetracks were always fuzzy, even for Santa Anita, their original, flagship property. Frank Stronach reportedly believed in some kind of synergy between women shopping for Gucci bags and wagering on horse races.......Huh? I don't get that....never did....never will.

Of course that glib dismissal is unfair to Stronach on some level. At least he was trying something, which was more than one could say about most other racetrack owners, who seemed clueless about how to save their dying businesses. They still do. Casinos are a temporary patch, a parasite that will eventually eat the host. What other ideas to save racing have you heard lately?

In too many ways, Thoroughbred racing does not fit that well with the modern American lifestyle. The few racetracks that are really successful—Del Mar, Keeneland, Saratoga—are the ones capable of presenting truly boutique-quality racing in a uniquely attractive setting. All three of those racetracks are such uniquely attractive physical sites that people enjoy visiting them, simply for their beauty, even when there are no horses.

Sure, racing can contract, breed fewer foals, run fewer races, and possibly have a better chance of ultimate survival, but the truth is that there are always going to be far more bad to moderate racehorses than there are good ones. Horses that deserve to run in the big events, the only events of just about any type of sport that the public at large find interesting, worth watching, and betting on, will always be few and far between for any breeder, any owner, any trainer, any jockey.

And yet, that is what Thoroughbred racing and breeding must do—find a way to make those few horses, those few big events pay for all the rest.

Any ideas?

Welcome to my world

2009-02-19T12:47:00.003-06:00

At long last, with the help of my step-son Jesse Cleary-Budge, I've managed to publish my website. It is fairly sparse right now, but hopefully over the next few months, I'll be able to add more features, more links, more information.

The overall plan is to use this website (ormondepedigrees.com) as both a business site and an informational site for readers. Periodically, I will link to articles that I publish in Thoroughbred Times magazine, where I serve as Bloodstock editor. I expect I will also find articles by other writers as well that are worth including in the links section as well.

If you have comments or questions, please feel free to send me an email via the link provided. I always enjoy hearing the ideas of others. How else are you going to learn something new?

Cheers! And welcome to my world.

The pedigree guru

2008-04-13T18:58:00.000-05:00

John P. Sparkman has been Bloodstock Editor for Thoroughbred Times, the national newsweekly for the Thoroughbred industry, since 1994. Before becoming the pedigree and Thoroughbred history guru for the Times, however, he enjoyed a 15-year career as general manager of William du Pont III's Pillar Stud.

Fittingly, one of his first duties at the Times was to analyze the pedigree of 1994 Kentucky Derby winner Go for Gin. While managing Pillar, Sparkman was instrumental in buying Go for Gin's dam, Never Knock on behalf of du Pont's wife, Pamela Darmstadt du Pont. Sparkman then selected Cormorant for Never Knock as the best choice who fit within Pam du Pont's budget and also fit the mare's conformation, pedigree, and temperament.

Now semi-retired from Thoroughbred Times, John P. Sparkman is once again free to assist breeders in mating their mares, stallion analysis, preparing specialty pedigrees, or creating and completing unique research projects. He brings over 40 years of invaluable experience, during which his matings have resulted in more than 45 stakes winners, and almost a 10% strike rate, despite limited budgets, as shown in the statistics from the Pillar experience.

Put that experience to work for you for matings, pedigrees, stallion analysis, or research projects.