nasrullah put high-test petrol in the tank

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apalachee, aptitude, blame, dosage, federico tesio, franco varola, moccassin, nasrullah, nervous energy, nureyev, philosophy and pedigrees, ridan, rough shod, sadler's wells

Reader Russ Fisher had a question about “the effect that the Nasrullah blood seems to have had with” the family of Rough Shod, which has produced such stars as Ridan, Moccasin, Apalachee, Nureyev, Sadler’s Wells, Blame, and others.

In particular, Fisher said, “It looks like Nasrullah was able to bring out the distance genes found far back in the family.”

One way of looking at this is through the prism of dosage. As used by Franco Varola, dosage categorized many of the Nearco horses, including Nasrullah as brilliant, others as trans-brilliant or intermediate. But in Varola’s usage that wasn’t a distance evaluation but rather a humanistic assessment of the horse’s dynamics.

In essence, being brilliant meant having speed (and usually high energy) but also the potential to race a distance or get horses capable of doing so. Certainly that was true of Nasrullah, who was a splendid 2yo and matured well at 3 to be third in the Derby, run at Newmarket in 1943 because of WWII.

So, the “nervous energy” that Federico Tesio writes about is a significant part of what I think of as brilliance in racing aptitude. It’s the energy, enthusiasm, fire, and determination that puts lead in the pencil, or high-test petrol in the tank of your sports car. Too much of this energy can cause a horse to be unreliable as a racing prospect; too little and you’ve a nice pasture ornament.

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jersey town another gem for fipke

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aqueduct racecourse, banshee breeze, bc dirt mile, bloodstock theories, charles fipke, cigar mile, dosage, female family inbreeding, haynesfield, jersey girl, jersey town, keeneland november sale, keeper hill, nicking, planning a racing program, sid fernando, speightstown, stallion prospect, tale of ekati, tale of the cat, top performers as producers, werk thoroughbred consultants

The following post appeared earlier this week at Paulick Report.

 

Owner-breeder Charles Fipke is the luckiest man in the world. As a professional geologist and entrepreneur, he literally finds mountains of gold and gems. And as a hobby, he breeds Grade 1 racehorses.

Even there, Fipke is lucky. Two years ago, his homebred Tale of Ekati (by Tale of the Cat) won the Cigar Mile in 2008 on a disqualification. This weekend, Fipke’s homebred Jersey Town (Speightstown) won the Cigar Mile as the longest shot on the board at 34-1 over G1 winners Haynesfield, Girolamo, Bribon, Vineyard Haven, and others.

Now, fellow horse breeders, we need to sit down and get some good air in our lungs for this next one. Fipke bought the dams of both his Cigar Mile winners at auction while carrying those G1 winners.

We are in the thin-air territory of good luck and amazing fortune here, right?

Well, there is also a lot of hard work involved at every step in the process of mating and producing a good racing prospect.

Sid Fernando, president of Werk Thoroughbred Consultants, is a regular consultant to Fipke, and Fernando said that “Chuck is really a very enthusiastic horse owner. He has a theory about what works, and he enjoys planning matings according to the various theories that he operates with. Chuck gets suggestions from various individuals, but he makes the final decisions on everything.”

In approaching his matings, Fipke said, “The Werk nick is the guide. And a newer approach I have been following is using duplications of the female line of the mare. Also, you want to have a good dosage profile with speed in it, and when Jack Werk was alive, we started classifying the horses that aren’t classified according to the chefs de race.

“We work out the distance aptitude of each horse four different ways, and if you get a result that says this ought to be a 12-furlong horse all four ways, it’s pretty likely that is what you’ll get. Then you have to take into account the female part of the family because that will change it.”

The breeder also takes note of the physical qualities of his horses, and he purchased Jersey Town’s dam, multiple G1 winner Jersey Girl (Belong to Me), for $700,000 at the 2005 Keeneland November sale when the mare was carrying this colt.

While her immense racing talent was important to Fipke, he said Jersey Girl “was an outstanding mare. I usually fall for the horse I think is the best-conformed in the sale, and the year I bought her, she was the best by far.”

A very good-looking and strongly made winner in nine of 11 starts, Jersey Girl was one of the best 3-year-old fillies of 1998, with Banshee Breeze (Unbridled) getting the nod as the Eclipse Award champion, with Acorn and Mother Goose winner Jersey Girl and Kentucky Oaks winner Keeper Hill (Deputy Minister) narrowly behind her.

At the time of her sale, however, Jersey Girl was the dam of four foals and no winners. In commercial terms, buying her was a risk, but Fipke isn’t a commercial breeder.

And the result of the mare’s mating was an outstanding chestnut colt by champion sprinter Speightstown.

Fernando said the “best-looking horse in the paddock for the Cigar Mile was Girolamo, but Jersey Town was next. He isn’t as big as Girolamo, but Jersey Town was strutting around, has a big and powerful hindquarter, and a ton of presence. He stays in training for 2011.”

Jersey Town had been second or third in three successive graded stakes before the Cigar Mile and reversed the form of his second in the Bold Ruler, when the Speightstown colt raced very wide, Fipke said. “We decided to pass the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile and instead go for the Cigar Mile,” Fipke said. “We knew going into the Cigar Mile that he was good, and with the determination, he pulled on through. The biggest thing he’s got is great determination, and that comes from his mum.”

With all the retirements recently, having Jersey Town racing next year is good news for racing, and Fipke believes there are better things ahead for his colt, who has five victories and five seconds from 12 starts.

The breeder said, “We will go for the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile next year, and we might try sprinting him some because he has so much speed.”

The combination of speed and a G1 victory make Jersey Town a very attractive stallion prospect, and Fernando noted that breeder Fipke “always liked this colt quite a bit, and his goal was to make him a stallion. He has done that.”

In addition to making Jersey Town an interesting stallion prospect, Fipke has made Jersey Girl a G1 producer. The breeder said, “Jersey Girl has a nice 3-year-old by Perfect Soul who is so big and massive that he was sent home to grow a little more. He is now in Florida with J.B. McKathan.” The colt’s name is Soul of Ekati, another namesake of the Ekati mine  in western Canada where Fipke discovered diamonds.

Barren in 2008, Jersey Girl has successive foals by Perfect Soul, Fipke’s Canadian champion by Sadler’s Wells. The horse stands at Darby Dan, like Cigar Mile winner Tale of Ekati.

 

selecting stallions per estes

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blood-horse magazine, bruce lowe, dosage, figure system, history of breeding, joe estes, selection criteria for stallions, stallion selection, statistics in thoroughbred breeding

Joe Estes was a great researcher and a monumental force in evaluating the way we think about Thoroughbred pedigrees.

When he came to the Blood-Horse about 80 years ago, nobody thought about statistics as a means of assessing bloodstock or pedigrees. For one thing, it was so hard to compile a statistically valid body of data that essentially nobody wanted to do it.

Estes was lucky to have his position at the Blood-Horse because it allowed him to search for answers with a staff that had the leisure to follow his direction and compile reams of information that he could analyse and explain to the breeding public.

The volume of information he and the magazine staff could compile allowed him to discuss things about pedigrees that were totally new to breeders. Heretofore, breeders had selected mares on the basis of the leading broodmare sires, or by the Bruce Lowe family numbers, or according to the nick.

And here comes this quiet man writing things in an upstart publication (Blood-Horse wasn’t always the house organ) that came out of left field, at least according to the way most people thought at the time. Using his command of statistics and language, Estes retarded the effect of dosage on breeding by a good half-century, and his combination of satire and research into the Figure System of Bruce Lowe effectively destroyed it as a serious breeding system.

So after writing about stallion selection this week, I went in search of some input from Estes. In the Blood-Horse of 26 August 1939, he wrote:

The most important item in appraising the stud prospects of a young horse is his racing class. The racing class and breeding records of his sire and dam are also worthy of consideration, but beyond that the pedigree will tell you nothing worth remembering.

The prevalence of the popular notion that a good sire must come from a sire family (a term invented by Bruce Lowe, all-time hocus-pocus champion in Thoroughbred breeding) is easy enough to understand. It provides  a reason to predict that a horse from a non-sire family probably will fail at the stud. And he probably will. So will the average good horse from any family.

Estes sure packed a punch, didn’t he? Still does.

bloodstock selection: differing perspectives

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aptitude, audley farm, biomechanics, bob baffert, conformation, dosage, franco varola, herd dynamic, keeneland, kerry thomas, lemhi go, northern dancer, nw management, quiet american, raise a native, rare beauty, smarty jones, thomas herding technique, typology

In selecting broodmares and mating them to stallions, there are almost as many opinions as there are buyers. Really promising physiques attract my attention, especially when allied with good racing performance. I tend to evaluate this in terms of biomechanical quality. (There are several posts on this blog regarding biomechanics available to read from last month.)

Kerry Thomas, who has developed Thomas Herding Technique, uses equine psychology and behavior characteristics to evaluate prospects. Read more about Thomas and his approach here, which also includes a 10-minute video with trainer Bob Baffert.

Another line of evaluation is deep pedigree theory and study, such as that used by Franco Varola, developer of the typology of Thoroughbred aptitudes that he described using dosage. I wrote about Varola just a few days ago (here) and was thrilled to find that Varola, as consultant to breeder Audley Farm, was involved in the production of both a mare that I own and her half-sister, whom Thomas selected as an outstanding foundation mare at the recently concluded Keeneland November sale.

The primary attraction in my purchase of G2 winner Lemhi Go was her racing class, which was quite high, allied with her pedigree. She carries no Raise a Native, and her only Northern Dancer is through that stallion’s son Giboulee, sire of Lemhi Go’s dam Midnight Rapture. Not surprisingly for a high-class racemare, Lemhi Go is a scopey mare with quality and presence. She also has a smooth, lengthy walk that is lovely to watch.

In evaluating her half-sister Rare Beauty at Keeneland, Thomas noted that Rare Beauty “was in a class by herself” as a broodmare. Thomas makes his observations purely by eye, watching horses alone or in company with others. Using the horse’s own actions to gain insight about its attitudes, he said that Rare Beauty was “the most emotionally sound, mentally prepared, highest herd dynamic mare of the sale.”

Makes her sound like a crackerjack, right? Well, she was one impressive specimen. Standing 16.3 hands, Rare Beauty was typical of her sire, Quiet American. She was quite big all over, very ruggedly made with strong bone and tendons, and well-conformed.

She has a high wither, great length through the body, and a good eye. I suspect that her stature and commanding presence caught Thomas’s eye. His summation was that “Rare Beauty’s inner character and behavioral dynamics (both Group Herd Dynamic and Individual Herd Dynamic) far exceeded her peers.”

In foal to Kentucky Derby winner Smarty Jones, the mare sold for $20,000 to NW Management, agent.

bunk and debunking

Tags

birdstone, birth date, calvin borel, dosage, Kentucky Derby, mine that bird, size

One of the many points of interest coming out of Mine That Bird’s victory in the Kentucky Derby is a welcome debunking of many myths and associated foolishness about bloodlines and breeding.

Once again, the old canard dosage received its due. Mine That Bird has a dosage index of 5.40 and surely was suffering from the inadequacies of stamina as he sliced past the competition to win the Kentucky classic. Already exposed as rare foolishness masquerading as a handicapping scheme by such earlier Kentucky Derby results as Strike the Gold and the dosage-busting exacta of Charismatic and Menifee, dosage is lovely exercise for those wanting to refresh their math skills.

Among the less arcane myths exploded by this year’s Kentucky Derby winner was the bias against May foals. Not yet chronologically 3-year-olds, they are supposed to be at a disadvantage against the older members of their crop. Well, if so, then don’t tell Mine That Bird. He was foaled on May 10.

Another “disadvantage” of May foals is that they are supposed to be smaller, and Mine That Bird is definitely a smallish to medium-sized horse, like his sire Birdstone, and paternal grandsire Grindstone. Size, however, did not prevent them from earning success in the classics, and it certainly did not prevent Mine That Bird from flying home over his competition. So perhaps we should conclude from these examples that being tall has nothing to do with anything other than being tall and that being fast is what it’s all about.

So far from being a disadvantage, Mine That Bird’s size was part of the reason he won the classic (along with tremendous stamina and gameness). When a reporter asked rider Calvin Borel how he got through a hole in the stretch that allowed the colt to maintain his momentum and surge on to victory, Borel said it was a small hole but that Mine That Bird was a small horse and shot right through.

Well done to them both.

Size, birth date, ear carriage, and other senseless things have little or nothing to do with what a horse becomes as an athlete. How the horse is managed and how it responds to the opportunities it is given make all that difference, and that boils down to character and guts.

The glory goes to those who have ’em.