An unlikely star emerged from the first crop of Adena Springs Kentucky’s stallion, Capo Bastone (Street Boss/Fight to Love). In the second race at Keeneland on April 11, 2018, Hargus won a maiden special weight for two-year-olds by 2 ½ lengths, earning $26,820. Capo Bastone stands for $4,000, and wasn’t on anybody’s radar as a freshman sire to watch.

The colt was named after near-legendary Kentucky hard boot and breeder Hargus Sexton, who died last year at 96. Opinionated, tough-minded and fiercely loyal as a friend, Hargus Sexton himself was a monument to the thoroughbred industry in Kentucky, and when his longtime friend Danny Pate acquired the Capo Bastone colt in an unusual sharing deal with breeder John Stuart, even he didn’t have high hopes. Pate put the colt through the 2017 Fasig Tipton October Yearling Sale, with a modest reserve of $9,000, but the colt got not a single bid, and went through the ring and back to Pate.

Pate sent the colt to two-year-old specialist Wesley Ward for training, and named him after his friend who had so recently passed on.

Capo Bastone, it should be noted, has a two-year-old foal crop of only four registered foals. By coincidence, he was co-bred by the late Hargus Sexton himself. Ward will be taking the equine Hargus to Churchill in May, and then, perhaps, on to Ascot.

-- Roberta Smoodin