What would happen to Mr. Prospector if he were a stallion prospect for 2022? Really, where would a very fast racehorse who didn’t win a graded stakes go to stud?
And don’t even think about Danzig.
Among the sires and stallion prospects at the commercial stallion farms today, there is a startling uniformity of pedigree and accomplishment. As one stallion manager told me, “If a horse doesn’t have a G1 on his race record, and preferably a G1 at nine furlongs or less, we know there’s not much reason to stand him.”
One might be surprised that the stallion operations such as Coolmore, Darley, Claiborne, Gainesway, Hill ‘n’ Dale, Lane’s End, Spendthrift, and WinStar don’t set the bar on who goes to stud and who doesn’t. They do, in a round-about way, of course, but the real test of selection is what will sell.
Stallion farms don’t want to stand stallions whose seasons they can’t sell, and commercial breeders don’t want to use stallions whose stock they won’t make a profit on. Therefore, the projections of stallion managers and individual breeders are the yardstick to measure the horses they want at stud and that end up going to stud and making a good early impression.
In the absence of very strong demand from private breeders who race their own stock, the marketplace for stallions is dictated by the majority of buyers, and those are resellers, primarily at the sales of racehorse prospects in training as 2-year-olds.
To change that dynamic, I would estimate that owner-breeder operations would need to account for at least 40-50 percent of the Kentucky stud fees sold, but today, I’d estimate those men and women who primarily race their own homebreds represent 20 percent or less of the pool of breeders who use Kentucky stallions.
As a result, the great majority of the stallion pool is predicated on what will sell to the great majority of buyers. The obvious emphasis is upon the young, very high-achieving racehorses with speed. Champions and near-champions only need apply.
In one sense, that might be a good thing because it places an intense emphasis upon the expression of racetrack excellence.
We do, however, have a long and well-documented history of breeding the Thoroughbred, and despite the importance of breeding to animals with superior athletic ability, the greatest sires are not always the greatest racehorses.
For every St. Simon or Nearco, there is a Phalaris or a Bull Lea. Not to mention such relative castoffs as the unraced Alibhai or the non-stakes winner Danzig.
The obvious reason for this is that racing and breeding are different things and require different characteristics, to a degree.
In racing, the emphasis, perhaps nearly the only emphasis, is on the phenotype, the physical animal in front of us. In breeding, however, the emphasis is the genotype of the horses involved.
Genotype is trickier because we don’t know exactly what makes a great sire so successful and what makes another “just a horse.”
Consider a couple of champions from the mid-1960s: Northern Dancer and Buckpasser. The best 3-year-old colts of 1964 and 1966, respectively, each had an outstanding racing record, went to stud with high acclaim, and achieved immediate success. Would anyone question, though, which was the more influential sire?
Hands down, it was Northern Dancer, and from the inferential evidence of his progeny, I’d say that Northern Dancer essentially got all the positive, high-class alleles from both of his paternal grandsire Nearco and great-grandsire Hyperion (sire of Nearctic’s dam), as well as from his maternal grandsire Native Dancer. That inheritance resulted in Northern Dancer passing on so much positive genetic code that his offspring were able to express racing ability of a very high order from an unusually high percentage of those offspring.
The horse who receives a higher proportion of genes that help the next generation isn’t always a champion, and we have seen others, including such contemporary stallion stars as Malibu Moon, Into Mischief, and Tapit, who began a life at stud with the season sales professionals beating down doors in search of mares to fill their books.
The evidence of the past and the great successes of the present clearly indicate that breeders and their advisers should advocate to have more stallions – not fewer – go to stud annually to allow those “lucky genes” to have expression, rather than smothering the breed with a mudslide of uniformity.
bloodstock in the bluegrass 
So much for the great success’ of past and present breeders and advisors. What happened in the case of the late great Sunday Silence inreference to the mental attitude of his owners, breeders, advisors and trainer? It became clear that their horse color bias influenced Sunday Silence’s U.S stallion potential.
Eventually, his greatness became a huge economical success for Japan instead of America. The breeder’s “lame” excuse was that Sunday Silence’s dame was unknown. However, his trainer, Charles Whitingham, was quoted as referring to Sunday Silence as a “black sob.” Obviously, that affected Sunday Silence’s Belmont Stakes performance and U.S. stallion potential. Hence, horse abuse. Does horse abuse affect stallion performance?
Respectfully,
Mary
On Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:35 PM bloodstock in the bluegrass wrote:
> fmitchell07 posted: ” What would happen to Mr. Prospector if he were a > stallion prospect for 2022? Really, where would a very fast racehorse who > didn’t win a graded stakes go to stud? And don’t even think about Danzig. > Among the sires and stallion prospects at the comme” >
The color of Sunday Silence didn’t affect his appeal to people. The horse had inherited the color of his sire, Halo, who had been a high-priced sales yearling sold to Charles Engelhard and later became a high-class racehorse and sire. Among racing fans, Sunday Silence had a tremendous following, but among breeders, the attitude was quite a lot more reserved. This wasn’t related to his coloring, which could be seen as an indication of inheriting quite a lot of the better Halo genetics; the drawback to Sunday Silence as a stallion prospect was 1) the breeding economics of the day and 2) the fairly obscure, non-commercial names in the bottom half of the pedigree that represented his dam.
The Reagan tax reform act of 1986 hit the horse business (and several other areas of investment) very hard because it changed the way that losses in horses, housing, real estate, and a some other things could be written off against income on taxes. As a result, prices in those areas plummeted, and horses were awash in the marketplace. People with the money to breed racehorses were very uncertain about how much it would cost them and how much it would impact their overall “wealth” to do so. So there was a really serious depression in prices at sales and consequently in the private market for stallion shares. When, in 1990, Easy Goer was retired, he was not syndicated; he was retained as wholly owned by Ogden Phipps, his breeder. The same year, when Arthur Hancock tried to syndicate Sunday Silence and needed to do so for his own economic stability, he was able to get a positive response from only a couple of stalwart, essentially home-breeding operations, W.T. Young at Overbrook and Josephine Abercrombie at Pin Oak Stud. As a result, Zenya Yoshida, who already owned a quarter-interest in the horse, was able to offer enough money (about $11 million gross) to buy Sunday Silence outright and take him to stand in Japan at his Shadai Farm.
That changed the history of Japanese racing and breeding forever.
The second point of concern among breeders was the pedigree of Sunday Silence’s dam Wishing Well. She was a good racemare, winning a dozen races from 38 starts, but she had a pedigree that was contrary to fashion and familiarity. Her sire was the good Promised Land horse Understanding (who won the Stuyvesant Handicap; sired only two stakes winners). The sires of the next three dams were Montparnasse (Gulf Stream), Hillary (Khaled), and Free France (Man o’ War). Very few Kentucky stallions had such a pedigree and certainly no other highly successful stallion had a pedigree with so many unfamiliar names. Fear and uncertainty ruled.
Yoshida, on the other hand, was looking for a high-class racehorse who was an outcross for his great Northern Dancer sire Northern Taste (Northern Dancer) and for the many other Northern Dancer-line mares that were being purchased to breed in Japan. Sunday Silence fitted those requirements perfectly.
And so, history was made.
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