There is no reason for me to attempt to disguise my love for Uncle Mo. It was, in fact, love at first sight, at an Ashford Stud open house a few years ago. He is, simply, the most magnificent stallion I’ve ever seen.

Not my usual taste: I tend to love flashy stallions with socks and blazes and pretty heads. This is not Mo. Mo is huge, relentlessly bay, relentlessly masculine, with stout bone, and a giant hip and amazing shoulder, and that big-boy head and intense eyes that dare you not to fall for him. I could have looked at him for an hour. I had to pet his magnificent neck. I’d previously disregarded him as, from a pedigree nerd’s standpoint, he was lacking—by Indian Charlie, from the Caro line? No other stallion from that line had succeeded. This was a fluke, destined for failure at stud.

Then Uncle Mo started getting winners, stakes winners, graded stakes winners, and I was forced to reconsider. Not only was he drop dead gorgeous, but something real was going on with this outcross stallion: he was improving his mares by leaps and bounds. Then Nyquist happened. Champion Two-Year-Old Colt, Kentucky Derby winner—and it wasn’t as if he were the anomaly. Uncle Mo currently is number 11 on the leading sires list, and is number three on the Leading Sires of Two-Year-Olds list, behind only Into Mischief and American Pharoah. Uncle Mo is the real deal.

In the Starlet S.-G1 at Los Alamitos, an Uncle Mo exacta occurred, with Bast winning, and favored Donna Veloce finishing second, in a terrific race that pitted the two fast fillies against each other in a thrilling stretch run. Both fillies were expensive acquisitions, with Bast fetching $500,000 as a Keeneland September yearling, and Donna Veloce bringing $800,000 at the Fasig-Tipton Two-Year-Olds in Training Sale earlier this year, after being hammered down for $300,000 as a weanling at Keeneland. No surprise, given Uncle Mo’s success at stud, and the fact that he imparts to his offspring his imposing physical form, throwing leggy, large foals with his astonishing hip and shoulder.

The differences in the pedigrees of the two fillies is indicative of the wide variety of mares that Uncle Mo succeeds with. The single glaring similarity is that both fillies are inbred to Northern Dancer, Bast being 6 x 6 x 5 x 6 x 5, and Donna Veloce being 6 x 6 x 5 x 4, the latter through different sources, the former having two doses of Danzig. One other sneaky similarity exists: the stamina influence of His Majesty, in the fifth position in Bast through his son, Pleasant Colony, and grandson St. Jovite, and in the same position in Donna Veloce, through Pleasant Colony as well, but this time through Pleasant Colony’s daughter Shared Interest.

Bast’s pedigree initially reveals little except for the huge anomaly of having Arch on both her sire’s side and her dam’s side. Arch is the sire of Uncle Mo’s dam, Playa Maya, and also the sire of Bast’s dam, Laffina, making Bast 3 x 2 Arch. Ordinarily, this would seem like an inbreeding disaster in the making, though Arch is a wealth of blood, being by Kris S., who is by Roberto, and out of the Princequillo mare Sharp Queen, while being out of Aurora, a millionaire stakes-winning daughter of Danzig and granddaughter of the Blue Hen Courtly Dee, one of the two or three greatest broodmares of the twentieth century.

One must look to European pedigrees to begin to understand why this bold inbreeding works. It’s the “there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing” premise, and in European breeding, this can refer to the ubiquitousness of the stallion Green Desert. Inbreeding to Green Desert, close up on the page, is commonplace, and for good reason. He was by Danzig, out of a daughter of Courtly Dee, Foreign Courier, making him a close genetic relative of Aurora, also by Danzig, and also a granddaughter of Courtly Dee. In Aurora, add the fact that her mother, Champion Althea, was a daughter of Alydar, adding Raise a Native and more Nasrullah to Bast’s pedigree, and we have a fabulous cocktail of the same ingredients which have created so many European stakes winners. We also must realize that this pedigree is a foreshadowing of what may be the brilliance of Arch broodmares in general, and the beginning of a trend of inbreeding to Arch, no matter how close.

Donna Veloce’s pedigree makes instant sense as, added to the inbreeding to Northern Dancer and the dose of His Majesty which Uncle Mo loves in mares, we have a thundering echo of Uncle Mo’s best son and promising young stud Nyquist, Champion Two-Year-Old Colt and winner of the Kentucky Derby-G1. Nyquist is out of the Forestry mare Seeking Gabrielle, who is out of the Seeking the Gold mare Seeking Regina. Donna Veloce, out of a Montjeu mare (providing the dose of Northern Dancer through Sadler’s Wells, his sire), has a second dam, Cash Run, by Seeking the Gold. Cash Run’s dam is Shared Interest, the dam of Forestry himself, making Donna Veloce closely related to Nyquist. Forestry, of course, was by Storm Cat, a grandson of Northern Dancer, just as Montjeu is.

It must also be noted that Shared Interest is tail female Myrtlewood, one of the most important North American historical mares, as she is also the tail female broodmare of both Seattle Slew and Mr. Prospector, making Cash Run double-bred Myrtlewood, through her Mr. Prospector line sire and her tail female line. The cleverness of this pedigree is a paean to whomever designed it, and it may have created a female version of Nyquist.

These two fillies serve to underscore the continued importance of Uncle Mo specifically, and outcross stallions in general. Long live the Caro line. And, just in case you’ve been unplugged from the racing world for the past 24 hours, it’s worth noting that Bast’s win was just one of five in a row for Bob Baffert at Los Alamitos yesterday, as his charge Thousand Words won the Los Alamitos Futurity S.-G2, not to mention three other wins, including the sensational maiden special weight winner Ra’ad, who seemed to be toiling in the slop yet found another gear down the stretch to become a convincing winner in his first time out. It was a race day for true phenomena: Uncle Mo and Baffert.

-- Roberta Smoodin