Which young sires become super sires?

Jocelyn de Moubray looks back at leading first-season sires of seasons past to assess if there is a system to predict...

Which young sires become super sires?

I DON’T KNOW when people started counting to see who was the champion first-season sire in Britain and Ireland, but I suspect it was some time in the 1980s. Initially, anyway, I am sure it was probably more of a way to fill some empty columns in the trade press rather than a marketing ploy or something of real interest.

An early first-season sire sensation was Coolmore’s Sadler’s Wells in 1988.

Courtesy of an unlikely quirk, the son of Northern Dancer not only produced his two best two-year-olds in his first crop but, remarkably, his sons Scenic and Prince Of Dance ran a dead heat for the Group 1 Dewhurst Stakes.

In The Wings, another son, was unbeaten in two starts in Deauville. Those success meant that Coolmore’s first star stallion was well and truly launched with his first crop of two-year-olds.

This was something the best sons of Northern Dancer did – Danzig had started even faster in 1984 when three from his first crop of 30 foals won Grade 1s at two – Chief’s Crown, Contredance and Stephan’s Odyssey. To put this achievement in perspective, at the time the US foal crop numbered less than 50,000 foals, and from only 30 of these Danzig produced a champion colt and two other top two-year-olds.

In the US plenty of first-season sires have produced two Grade 1 winners, including the 2021 champion Gun Runner, sire of Echo Zulu and Gunite, as well as the Grade 1-placed Pappacap.

Others to have had two Grade 1-winning juveniles from their first crop in recent years include Nyquist, Liam’s Map, Union Rags and Uncle Mo, but three Grade 1 winners from a first crop of two-year-olds remains a rare achievement, as is the two produced by Sadler’s Wells in Europe.

Since the 1980s two-year-old racing and stallion management has, of course, changed beyond recognition.

In Britain and Ireland there are now significantly more Group races for two-yearolds and many more races overall, while the advent of All-Weather racing has extended the two-year-old racing season to more than nine months from mid-March to the end of December.

At the same time popular first-season stallions tend to have at least double the number of foals that their 1980s counterparts had. Sadler’s Wells stood at £IR125,000 and had around 50 foals in 1986, whereas his son Galileo stood at the relatively modest fee of £IR50,000 and produced some 130 foals in 2003.

The first-season sire championship has evolved, too, and has become a significant test for every stallion, and an objective stallion owners plan for from the moment a horse retires to stud. It seems to be widely accepted that the first-season sire championship is decided by the number of winners rather than any other criteria and at some point it has been taken to include the major European racing countries.

The table below lists the champion first-season sires by number of winners in Britain and Ireland from the beginning of this century – Britain and Ireland only are listed as the European figures are not easily available from earlier years.

There have been 24 champions with ties in 2003, 2007 and 2014. All but four of these champions stood in Ireland. The list of champions includes eventual great sires, top sires, ordinary sires and perhaps even some poor ones, as well as those who died too young for anybody to be sure in which category they would have ended up.

There are a few obvious conclusions to be drawn from this simple list alone.

Most of these champions were relatively inexpensive stallions when they first retired to stud. Of the 24, 19 started their careers standing at €12,500 or less. Four went on to command six-figure fees and a total of 11, so nearly half, went on to stand at €40,000 or higher, which does, of course, explain why stallion owners make winning the championship an objective.

The British-based Whitsbury Manor Stud has had two champions, but this is a contest which has been dominated by Irish studs, and in recent years by the O’Callaghan family’s Tally-Ho Stud, which has stood five of the last nine champions.

Stallions and their actual genetic potential will always remain something of a mystery, but the recent winners of this championship does suggest that those hoping to emulate them could do a lot worse than buying or using a son of a leading first-season sire who was a Group winner before the end of July.

Mastercraftsman, Showcasing, Mehmas, Cotai Glory are among those who fulfilled these criteria exactly.

Table 2 overleaf gives some more detail on foals ran as two-year-olds. More recent outstanding first-crop sires such as No Nay Never, Society Rock, Mehmas, Ardad and Cotai Glory have been represented by more than 80 per cent of their foals at two from their first crop.

The best middle-distance sires, represented here by Galileo, Sea The Stars, Le Havre, Dalakhani have had only 40 per cent or fewer of their foals on the track at two.

Ratings are never going to be accepted by everybody and those for two-year-olds are particularly difficult – races can be impossible to rate accurately the day after the event, and they can appear to be either far better or worse a few months later.

Although the ratings and precentages are only a guide or a guess, the stallions with an excellent ratio do often turn out to be very good ones, even if the middle-distance sires, with the exception of Frankel, don’t tend to do well by comparison with those who produce more precocious stock.

Mixed results

The number of individual Group winners looks to be a particularly significant marker. This century the only sires to have had more than two Group winners amongst their first crop of two-year-olds are Frankel, Oasis Dream, Zoffany, Night Of Thunder, Lope De Vega, Siyouni and Belardo. Perhaps the owners of the 183 mares covered by Belardo in 2021 have made a good decision?

Linamix and Vettori are included in the table because it is easy to get this information from the France Galop site and in their different ways their stud careers illustrate some of the recurring features of trying to evaluate young stallions.

Jean-Luc Lagardère’s homebred Linamix stood at the breeder’s farm and Lagardère himself was the only person, with one or two exceptions, to use the stallion at the beginning of his career. For Lagardère, Linamix was an immediate success producing horses such as Miss Satamixa, Housamix, Walk On Mix and Diamond Mix from a small first crop, but Lagardère was a hugely successful breeder and all of his horses at the time were trained by François Boutin or André Fabre.

It helps to show that the stallion owners who are prepared to give their new sires the benefit of the best mares and the best professionals to look after their progeny give them a big advantage.

Vettori was a Group 1 Poule d’Essai des Poulains-winning son of Machiavellian who retired to Fresnay Le Buffard. His small first crop included the top 1m4f performer

Linamix benefited from Jean-Luc Lagardère’s support, the good mares he received from the breeder, as well as from the training talents of André Fabre and François Boutin

Hightori and the leading two-year-old Lady Vettori, who went on to become the dam of Lope De Vega and Lady Frankel.

Vettori went to stand for many years in England, France and Brazil, covered many mares and produced larger crops, but he never produced another as good as Hightori (rated 127) or as important as Lady Vettori.

The samples on which new stallions are judged are, certainly at the beginning anyway, too small to avoid sampling errors.

A sire who gets two very good horses from 30 foals may be a top future sire, or it may just be a sampling error which will become apparent once a larger number has been assessed.

Most variables revert back towards the mean – in many cases a sire whose first crop is way above average will have subsequent crops below average, or those such as Dansili, whose first crop was only ordinary, may reveal their true level from a larger sample.

To put it another way, the top horses in the tiny first crops of sires such as Wootton Bassett and Kendargent didn’t necessarily mean they were going to develop into important sires, but once they had repeated the feat with their second and third crops it was time for breeders everywhere to take notice.

Forecasting which stallions are going to be successful is difficult and if it becomes just a little easier when their first two-year-olds have raced, there are still no certainties.