gb and ire racing Cracksman: the next time many of us see him again will be at a stud farm’s winter open day... but which one will it be?
A champion day
Brilliant performances from Cracksman and Roaring Lion ensured that British Champions Day lived up to its billing, writes Aisling Crowe
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oaring Lion and Cracksman, who have featured with metronomic regularity in these pages, signed off their British racing careers with Group 1 victories at Ascot’s October showcase. It was confirmed after Roaring Lion’s hard-fought victory over I Can Fly in the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes that he will retire to stud for 2019. Qatar Racing’s outstanding three-year-old will stand at David Redvers’s Tweenhills Stud in Gloucestershire, alongside fellow Qatar Racing’s new stallion Lightning Spear, and reverse shuttler, and exciting young sire, Zoustar. Roaring Lion is the winner of four Group 1s and placed in two more, including the Derby, and becomes the second confirmed son of North America’s champion Turf sire Kitten’s Joy to retire to stud in the UK.
The first was Bobby’s Kitten and the Lanwades Stud resident’s first foals are due to sell shortly with four catalogued for the Goffs November Foal Sale and 25 for the Tattersalls December Foal Sale. It will be fascinating to see how the market reacts to these weanlings, although it is probably not a portent of Roaring Lion’s stallion fortunes as Bobby’s Kitten retired to Lanwades with a lower profile and won his Group 1 in the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint, which would suggest a different type of mare than Roaring Lion will attract. Cracksman made it back-to-back Group 1 Champion Stakes triumphs, one more than his sire Frankel. It was a return to form on ground he favours for the four-year-old colt, trained by John Gosden for owner-breeder Anthony Oppenheimer. Winner of the Group 1 Prix Ganay at the start of this season, Cracksman looked out of
sorts when winning the Group 1 Coronation Cup at Epsom and was very distracted by the fillies in proximity to him at Royal Ascot, getting hot and bothered which contributed to his lacklustre second place in the Group 1 Prince of Wales’s Stakes. Jockey Frankie Dettori also felt that Cracksman got hot and bothered in other ways, and that the soaring heat of the 2018 summer and the prevelant fast ground was much less to his liking than the younger fillies were. Another superstar for Pivotal as a broodmare sire, Cracksman will now get to focus his attentions entirely on fillies without having the distraction of racing. Where that stud place will be has yet to be announced, but Oppenheimer indicated after the Champion Stakes that negotiations on his stallion career would begin immediately. Pivotal leapfrogged past Sadler’s Wells to
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