Collected is snorting fire in his desire to become the leading son of sire City Zip (by Carson City). Collected would be within sniffing distance of the earnings leadership for sons of City Zip, except for a quintet of millionaires, and the glamorously good-looking Collected moved his earnings to $600,500 with victory in the Grade 2 Californian Stakes, his sixth success from nine lifetime starts.

Those pesky millionaires include champion sprinter Work All Week (G1 Breeders’ Cup Sprint, $1.5 million), Palace (G1 Forego, G1 Vanderbilt; $1.5 million), City Style (G3 Strensall Stakes; $1.3 million), plus Alert Bay and Get Serious, who are G2 and G3 winners with earnings of $1.1 million each.

It is exceptional for a stallion to get five winners of $1 million or more, but these are only City Zip’s seven-figure earners from the Y chromosome side of the street. He has three daughters who have earned more than a million: Dayatthespa (champion turf filly; Breeders’ Cup Filly Turf), Catch a Glimpse (Canadian Horse of the Year; BC Juvenile Fillies Turf), and Finest City (BC Filly Sprint).

Not bad for a little chestnut horse.

And in the best-son category, City Zip is hands-down the best stallion son of the celebrated Mr. Prospector sire Carson City. Best known as a broodmare sire, Carson City has had some good results with sons like Pollard’s Vision (Kentucky Oaks winner Blind Luck), Cuvee (G1 Breeders’ Futurity winner Noble’s Promise), and Hear No Evil (G1 Forego and Carter winner Jackson Bend). None of the Carson City sons, however, has shown the consistency and high quality in their racing stock that is a hallmark of City Zip.

Most of the stock by City Zip also have plenty of zip, and that is what he displayed in his own racing career.

From 23 starts at 2 and 3, City Zip won eight stakes and placed second or third in eight more. His most notable victory came in the G1 Hopeful, when he deadheated with Yonaguska for the prize. City Zip loved Saratoga, also winning the G2 Saratoga Special and Sanford there at 2 and adding the G2 Amsterdam Stakes at 3.

To date, 67 racers by City Zip have become stakes winners (6 percent from foals), and 70 more are stakes-placed. In addition to transmitting his own innate speed, City Zip sires horses with quite a bit more distance capacity than he showed on the racetrack, and many of them show high form on either dirt or turf. His stock mature well, stay sound, and appear to enjoy being racehorses.

Many of these qualities are also found in the stock by City Zip’s famous younger brother, Horse of the Year Ghostzapper, who is 17. They are out of the Broodmare of the Year Baby Zip, who died last week at age 26. She was the daughter of top sire Relaunch (In Reality).

Collected, bred in Kentucky by Runnymede Farm and Peter Callahan, is the third foal from his dam, the Johannesburg mare Helena Bay. Collected was such a good-looking yearling that he brought $150,000 at the 2014 Keeneland September sale, which was the fourth-highest price of 55 City Zip yearlings sold that year. In 2015, Collected sold for $170,000 at the OBS March Sale of 2-Year-Olds in Training.

In addition to his high class and good looks, one of the things of great interest about Collected is that he has three successive lines of Northern Dancer in his dam. Helena Bay is from the Storm Cat male line (Storm Bird); her dam, Josette, is by Danehill (Danzig); and the third dam is Loure (Lyphard). Those are three of the six most important sons of Northern Dancer, and City Zip adds a fourth son, Nijinsky, through Carson City.

So Collected’s pedigree is essentially a fascinating take on the most popular breeding cross of the past generation: Mr. Prospector crossed with Northern Dancer. And the element that makes this one special is the sequential layering of Northern Dancer lines, which are then crossed to Mr. Prospector’s grandson City Zip.

I doubt that we will see many mares bred this way because it takes years of planning to develop the male-line layering we see in Helena Bay and her son Collected, but Runnymede Farm followed the program with the mare to get a yearling colt by Lookin at Lucky (Smart Strike) for the Mr. Prospector cross.

Then last year, they sent the mare to the Danzig stallion Hard Spun. That resulted in a foal of 2017 with four successive male lines of Northern Dancer, and the mare produced a colt earlier this month.

If he grows up to match that pedigree, he will be a racehorse indeed.