young stallions
It was a summer of Blues Darley’s Blue Point dominated the first-season sires’ title from the get go
Blue Point’s Group 1 winner Rosallion: the colt, who is out of the New Approach mare Rosaline, seen here winning the Prix Jean Luc Lagardère
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TALLION FEES don’t always translate into stud success, but the two sires atop of this season’s first-season sires’ league table were the two who commanded the highest fees when retiring to stud in 2020, and they represent Darley. The champion sprinter Blue Point retired to the stud’s Irish branch at Kildangan Stud alongside his brilliant sire Shamardal, whom he resembles enormously, while Too Darn Hot, a European champion two-year-old, was the new recruit to the Dalham Hall
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roster headed by his sire Dubawi. Successful in the Gimcrack at two and placed in the Dewhurst and Middle Park, Blue Point came into his own at four and five when he won four Group 1 sprints, including the Diamond Jubilee and King’s Stand at Royal Ascot of 2019. Given his juvenile exploits and his status as an elite sprinter it should come as no surprise that he was so quick off the blocks. The sire’s first crop is high on both quantity and quality with his 100 runners the most representatives of any Europeanbased first-season sire in 2022.
Blue Point’s 44 winners are also the most for that cohort as are their prize-money earnings, while his two top level winners and his ten black-type performers represent the peak. His first Group 1 winner was the Prix Jean-Luc Lagardère and Listed Pat Eddery Stakes winner Rosallion. Richard Hannon’s colt is a homebred for Sheikh Mohammed Obaid and boasts the owner-breeder’s brilliant broodmare Reem Three as his second dam. Rosallion’s dam is an unraced New Approach full-sister to the Group 2 Prix Daniel Wildenstein winner
