With all the great racing on Saturday, February 2, 2019, you’d expect a variety of pedigrees to begin appearing on the Kentucky Derby Trail. You’d be wrong. Harvey Wallbanger, who won the Holy Bull S.-G2 for trainer Kenny McPeek, and Tax, who won the Withers S.-G3, off a brilliant claim by trainer Danny Gargan, have so many similarities in their pedigrees that it would appear they may have been separated at birth, like the triplets movie CNN won’t stop advertising.

The similarities aren’t only surprising and striking. They represent dominant strains in contemporary pedigrees that produce young horses who can get a route of ground with ease, and give strength to the theory that the contemporary thoroughbred isn’t too inbred and fragile, but rather that these strengths contribute to horses who can get a classic distance with ease.

Both powerful Blue Hen mares and important twentieth and twenty-first century sires contribute to the ability of Harvey Wallbanger and Tax. Of course, with studs these days producing over a hundred offspring a year, it makes sense that certain stallions should contribute classic distance ability. But thoroughbred mares are lucky to have ten offspring in their lifetimes, so when certain mares appear, repetitively, in two pedigrees of horses on the Derby Trail, close enough to the actual competitor to appear in the first six generations, one must take notice.

The first of these mares is Wild Applause (1981), whose great grandmother was one of the twentieth centuries most important mare, mentioned endlessly in these columns, La Troienne. That Wild Applause appears in the third generation for both Tax and Harvey Wallbanger is what’s amazing. Tax, by the recently deceased Arch, is tail female Wild Applause; she is his great grandmother, the dam of Yell, by A.P. Indy, who, with Giant’s Causeway, produced Tax’s dam Toll. Wild Applause is also Harvey Wallbanger’s great grandmother, though in his pedigree she appears on the sires’ side, as she was the dam, with Mr. Prospector as the sire, of Congrats’ dam Praise. Congrats’ sire is the same A.P. Indy, making Yell in Tax’s pedigree and Congrats in Harvey Wallbanger’s pedigree very closely related, not quite siblings, but kissing cousins. Add in all the extra doses of La Troienne that appear through A.P. Indy, Glorious Song (in Giant’s Causeway’s pedigree), and Special Account in Harvey Wallbanger’s, and the similarities cannot be considered mere chance, but indicate, with certainty, the powerful influence La Troienne continues to have on contemporary race horses.

The other Blue Hen mare’s influence is another whom I continually reference, Secretariat’s dam, the great Princequillo mare Somethingroyal. Her appearance in both pedigrees is through A.P. Indy, of course, through her granddaughter Weekend Surprise. However, in Tax’s pedigree, she appears again, through Storm Cat’s dam, the Secretariat mare Terlingua. Tax’s pedigree becomes even stronger because of his great grandmother, Sharp Queen, on his sire’s side, as she is the dam of Kris S., and she too is by Princequillo, reeling in the two appearances of Somethingroyal on his dams’ side. Princequillo was leading broodmare sire for years in his heyday, and there is no such thing as too many Princequillo mares in any pedigree.

In each pedigree, another of the great Blue Hens of the twentieth century make cameo appearances. In Tax, the Never Bend mare Courtly Dee appears on his sires’ side in the fourth position, through her champion daughter Althea, by Alydar. From the 1968 foal crop, she brings another dose of La Troienne, through her son Bimelech, and she herself is by a daughter of War Admiral, Tulle. As the great granddam of Arch, the strength of her tail female line may have been responsible for Arch’s importance. She similarly appeared in the interesting, though less influential, sire Twining.

Harvey Wallbanger’s pedigree features another of the all time great broodmares, the Double Jay mare Continue, the grandmother of Forty Niner. Born in 1958, she brings an otherwise long-dead branch of thoroughbred breeding to the table, the sire Ben Brush, whose last male descendant was the productive and much-missed Broad Brush, who stood at Gainesway Farm in the 1990s. Continue’s pedigree features inbreeding to Ben Brush, 5 x 5 on her sire’s side, inbreeding that is otherwise unheard of. She was out of the Nasrullah mare Courtesy, offering, of course, the breed-altering Mahmoud’s female family, but also giving Continue inbreeding, three times, to Canterbury Pilgrim, twice through her influential son Chaucer, and once through her son Swynford. Clearly, Canterbury Pilgrim passed on the large heart gene that is also found in Somethingroyal, and getting this gene through two of her most important sons means that this mare of 1893 continues to influence the thoroughbred breed. It must also be noted that Broad Brush’s best runners were created by providing multiple doses of Turn-to on their dams’ sides, which Harvey Wallbanger’s pedigree provides, three times, as well as in-breeding to the influential mare Pocahontas, whose dam was the Princequillo mare, How.

Considering the male lineage of both Tax and Harvey Wallbanger, one sees multiple appearances by three of the twentieth century’s most important male lines: Northern Dancer, Turn-to, and Bold Ruler, all very close-up and visible. To begin, Danzig, a son of Northern Dancer, appears in the third position in Tax’s pedigree, as the sire of Arch’s dam, Aurora, and in the fourth position of Harvey Wallbanger’s pedigree, as the sire of Distorted Humors dam, Danzig’s Beauty. Both young runners have Northern Dancer himself in the fourth position, as the sire of the aforementioned Wild Applause. And both have yet another appearance by Northern Dancer, Tax through his son Storm Bird, and Harvey Wallbanger through his son Vice Regent. To see Northern Dancer himself visible on five generation pedigrees, three times each, twice from the same sources, Danzig and Wild Applause, is impressively unusual, and insures the passage, once more, of the large heart gene through his dam Natalma.

Then we must examine the presence of Turn-to in both pedigrees, presenting itself so similarly to the doses of Northern Dancer, through both male and female progenitors. In Tax’s pedigree, we see Roberto, grandson of Turn-to, twice, and Mr. Leader, also a grandson, once, though it is the presence of the mare Glorious Song, a granddaughter of Turn-To through his son Halo, who pulls these doses together by allowing that large heart gene to make its appearance directly. It should be noted that both young race horses also get a dose of Turn-to through Seattle Slew’s great-grandsire, Hail to Reason.

Seattle Slew also offers these pedigrees their ways back to Bold Ruler himself, but what’s significant is that both pedigrees also offer an underscoring of this line through other male relatives, in Tax, through Giant’s Causeways third dam, the Chieftain mare Imsodear, and in Harvey Wallbanger, through Spectacular Bid. The only knock one could make on Tax’s pedigree is the total absence of Mr. Prospector, which Harvey Wallbanger presents both top and bottom, but the argument could be made that the presence, in Tax, of Mr. P’s close genetic relative, Alydar, makes up for that, and presents yet another similarity. Tax’s pedigree more than makes up for this slight deficiency by the presence of Northern Dancer’s dam, Natalma, on the page twice in five generation pedigrees, and, just off the page, the presence of her half-sister, Cosmah, through Halo, bringing in-breeding to the great Almahmoud, another of the twentieth century’s most important mares, to Tax’s background.

The riches in today’s pedigrees couldn’t be underscored more than by this examination of two race horses who won two graded stakes races on the Kentucky Derby Trail within a couple of hours of each other. These similarities are more than a random occurrence. They represent, instead, a formula, much as water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, for the creation of a Derby field, utilizing the most important horses of the last hundred years. This is a jigsaw puzzle with numerous possible solutions, creating slightly differing outcomes in the placement of pieces, though each completed puzzle represents a beautiful whole and a winners’ circle photo.

-- Roberta Smoodin