Category Archives: Bloodstock

Given my love for the great mares, the Blue Hens of thoroughbred breeding, it should come as no surprise that my Kentucky Derby horse is the blue-blooded, Juddmonte-bred Tacitus, winner of the Tampa Bay Derby this year. The Juddmonte breeding program has a tradition of boldness, and its inbreeding and ground breaking are second to none. Tacitus is by Tapit, the leading stallion of our time, and himself a treasure trove of wondrous DNA…

Scat Daddy was a great sire, gone way too soon. Once considered a one-dimensional patriarch of sprinters on grass, his last few crops have featured a Triple Crown winner, Justify, able to get a distance on dirt, clearly. Not to mention many others, on turf, dirt and synthetic surfaces, at any distance, most recently the winner of the El Camino Real Derby at Golden Gate, Anothertwistafate, running off by seven lengths on the Tapeta surface.

The latest list of leading sires, as of the end of February, 2019, couldn’t be more telling. The changing of the millennium has marked a tidal shift in leading stallions, except for grand old Malibu Moon (1997), a perennial leading sire and cranky old man. When you go to see him at Spendthrift Farm, you are warned about his lack of patience and bad temper, but he is still magnificent, with his huge hind end, glorious shoulder, and sturdy, strong-boned look of his sire, A.P. Indy.

Tapit’s son Flashback, who began his stud career in 2015 at Lexington’s Hill ‘n’ Dale Farms, complete with guarantees to breeders selling weanlings and yearlings from owner Gary and Mary West, and a full first book, has been moved for the 2019 season to Diamond B Farm in Pennsylvania, and will stand there for $3500, compared to his beginning fee of $7500 in Kentucky.

An alien, landing on Earth on Saturday, February 16, 2019, to play the ponies, would’ve come to believe that only three stallions on the planet are worth breeding to (as Scat Daddy, the sire of Anothertwistafate, the El Camino Real Derby winner, is deceased), and this alien may be right.

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.

2019 is still a very young year, but the leading sires of three-year-olds, thus far, is worth examining. The usual suspects have changed, at least enough to remark upon. After a couple of stellar weekends in which his youngsters won nearly everything, stakes and maiden special weights, Violence leads the pack. Though his stud fee, at Hill ‘n’ Dale in Lexington, has rightly been upped to $40,000, it’s still unusual for a stallion with such a relatively low stud fee to be number one.

Can Quality Road get any hotter? Will he become, at the young age of 13, this year’s leading sire? It’s awfully early to prognosticate, but with his son, City of Light, winning the Pegasus S.-G1 on January 25, his get’s earnings went up by four million dollars.

The Santa Ynez S.-G2, run January 6, 2019 at Santa Anita, was hyped as a two-horse race, and commentators noted that they could not separate Bellafina and Mother Mother, as the two were both so talented. Wrong! This wasn’t so much a horse race, or even a two-horse race, as it was a demonstration of breathtaking ability and superiority on the part of the gorgeous Bellafina. She won by 8 ½ lengths, her separation from the rest of the field growing as she neared the finish line.

Opening day of Santa Anita’s winter 2018 meet demonstrated that Santa Claus was still at work for stallions Street Sense and Twirling Candy. Mckinzie, whom Bob Baffert touted early in the year as one of his very best three-year olds, finally showed his stuff, in a crowded Malibu S.-G1 field that showed that trainers believed the race was wide open for the taking. Mckinzie thought otherwise, and won by nearly five lengths with complete ease, coming from off the pace and making his challengers look like Grade One amateurs. Darley’s Street Sense, who stood for $45,000 in 2018, once again stamps himself as Street Cry’s best son, and Mckinzie’s pedigree underscores what, historically, works with Street Sense.