Jasmin Rouge
On the one hand, Jasmin Rouge (Dundeel) is a horse who’s confounded some old rules of thumb and has already exceeded expectations.
She cost only $70,000 at Melbourne Premier as an underdeveloped yearling and is one of Dundeel’s fillies, who are supposed to be inferior to his male offspring.
In contrast, one horse who fits that description – her brother Zucchero – was a magnificent type who sold for $725,000 at Magic Millions Gold Coast, and has had three starts for no placings, been gelded, and had a change of stable.
On the other hand, and other side of the pedigree, Jasmin Rouge fits perfectly to type. In winning Saturday’s Thoroughbred Club Stakes (Gr 3, 1200m) at Caulfield, the three-year-old became the latest stakes winner from the incredibly rich female family of Denise’s Joy (Seventh Hussar), her fifth dam.
She’s also the second in eight days, after Flemington’s Inglis Banner (RL, 1000m) went to debutant Within The Law (Lucky Vega), a two-year-old filly with Denise’s Joy still kicking in as her seventh dam.
These two pedigree factors for Jasmin Rouge are probably linked, with any possible downsides of being a Dundeel filly likely offset by her distaff line. It’s one that also features Group 1-winning mares in her third dam Euphoria (Marauding) – who’s also produced a stakes winner – and Secret Agenda (Not A Single Doubt), a half-sister to Jasmin Rouge’s dam Sweetener (Snitzel).
That was one possibility considered by trainer Clinton McDonald when he inspected the Segenhoe Stud-bred Jasmin Rouge – eight times in fact – before buying her for what now looks like a bargain. Her $70,000 purchase price only cleared Dundeel’s service fee by $4,000, but has now been almost doubled by her earnings from just two starts – not to mention the residual value from becoming a stakes-winning filly.
“It did come into my mind actually,” McDonald tells It’s In The Blood. “When you get a family like that that’s littered with good race fillies, I think it always comes through, and I think in this case it’s more onto the mare’s side than the stallion’s side.
“Secret Agenda was a very good mare, so too Euphoria. It’s just a really good fillies’ family. And Denise’s Joy – those types of families just keep on coming. Whether it skips one dam and gets to the next or whatever, they always seem to fit a pattern, and the horse produced is the right type of product and it shines through.”
The statistical picture on the well proven Dundeel is well known. The Arrowfield 15-year-old has had 33 stakes winners, and 25 of them are male, including all eight of his Group 1 victors. His males have brought 233 winners from 350 runners at 66.2 per cent, while his females have 153 winners from 268 runners at 57.1 per cent.
Is Jasmin Rouge an exception that proves the rule? Or might the picture be changing? Segenhoe’s Peter O’Brien feels it’s the latter.
“Dundeel has proven from the get-go that he can get an elite racehorse, and we’ve had a lot of luck with him,” he says.
“But the sex bias is there, although I have a theory about that whereby I think it will balance out, because breeders have realised in the last few years what type of mare you send to him.
“His fillies nowadays will have a bit more substance than they probably had at the start of his breeding career when people were mating to him. And I think this is the sort of thing that evens out when breeders realise what type of mare suits a stallion when they’re breeding to him consistently.”
O’Brien has a very illustrious and relevant case in point, who he saw first hand when working with Coolmore, Dundeel’s sire High Chaparral (Sadler’s Wells).
“High Chaparral stood in New Zealand and couldn’t get a filly to save himself,” says O’Brien of the stallion who sired such outstanding males in New Zealand as So You Think, Monaco Consul, Shoot Out and Descarado.
“My ignorant view on that was he got a lot staying type of mares in New Zealand, and his fillies were just too light and narrow.
“But he came to Australia and covered a lot of Danehill mares, and that bias balanced out. Breeders are astute and they figure things out.”
High Chaparral ended up with 36 male and 25 female stakes winners. (It’s probably safe to put that in the past tense, although he did have a winner at Wagga three weeks ago, in nine-year-old Will To Excel).
With Arrowfield having bred three of Dundeel’s eight Group 1 winners, including Super Seth out of a Redoute’s Choice mare, and Celestial Legend out of a Snitzel (by Redoute’s Choice) mare, O’Brien tips more breeders will follow the lead of the farm’s owner by increasingly sending the right sorts of matches to him.
“The one thing you have to be conscious about is John Messara doesn’t make many mistakes. He bought Dundeel, I assume, to cover his Redoute’s Choice mares, and they’ve had a lot of success with the horse,” he said.
“I think it will be interesting to watch Dundeel’s fillies in the next couple of years, with all those better mares, and better physical matches, having been sent to him.”
And what sort of mares are those?
“A very robust mare with plenty of bone, substance, a good big hip and a good hind leg,” O’Brien says.
Fortunately, he had one lying around.
Sweetener was well bred, being from the Denise’s Joy family and by a son of Redoute’s Choice in Snitzel. Despite this, she only cost $50,000 when Mark Kavanagh bought her at Easter 2011, and won only a Geelong maiden from eight starts, though she did run third in Caulfield’s Blue Diamond Prelude (Gr 3, 1100).
“She’s a very typical Snitzel mare,” O’Brien said. “She had a bit more quality, and is built like the proverbial brick shithouse.”
The mare, now 16, showed hints of breeding promise, with second foal Disruptor (Dissident) winning twice in Sydney, and Bliss (Sebring) having won a couple in the NSW bush. The fourth foal was Zucchero, who was so handsome Segenhoe repeated the mating, with immediately better results from this Dundeel filly Jasmin Rouge.
“Her mating with Dundeel, physically and on pedigree, was off the charts,” O’Brien said. “Zucchero has been disappointing, but he was a magnificent type, so we repeated the mating.
“And then Jasmin Rouge was more of a typical Dundeel filly – light on her feet, attractive and lightly-framed.
“She needed time. She wasn’t going to be ready for Magic Millions, and wasn’t good enough for Easter, so Melbourne premier gave her time without dancing with the big strong yearlings.
“I was delighted when Clinton bought her. He gives them time and that’s what she needed, and we obviously saw the benefit of that on Saturday.”
Pedigree-wise, there weren’t many tricks involved in putting Sweetener to Dundeel, with the only five-gen repetition being Sir Tristram at 4m x 5m, as the sire of Dundeel’s damsire Zabeel, and Sweetener’s second damsire Marauding.
The power of putting Dundeel over Redoute’s Choice is evident, however. Redoute’s ranks as his second-best nick – and his most common – with 49 winners from 78 runners, including two stakes winners. And Snitzel ranks third, with seven winners from 15 runners, and another pair of black type victors.
Another son of Redoute’s in Stratum, who died at 14, is a perfect six from six, with a three-time stakes winner in the Group 1-placed Entente.
For good measure, High Chaparral over Redoute’s Choice’s sire Danehill is hard to beat, ranking as his number two nick with 50 winners – six at stakes level – from 63 runners.
Aside from the stats, the other thing we’ve all heard about Dundeel fillies is they can be temperamentally questionable. At that Premier sale, McDonald kept going back to check.
“It’s one of those things I do when I identify a horse. The old man used to do it a lot,” he said of his trainer father Ross. “I think it does tell you whether their head mentally is right.
“The more you look at a horse the more you learn. You find something different every time you look at a horse, whether it’s positive or negative, especially with those cheaper horses. I think it’s a good thing, not a bad thing.
“You can look at the horse five or six times. Every time, it might be perfect mentally and cope with the situation, or it might have a bad moment.”
McDonald reports Jasmin Rouge looks a Dundeel filly who’s bucking that reputation, as well as the stats.
“She’s definitely very mentally sound, a sweet filly, and one who does everything right,” he said.
“At first she was a bit hot, just a typical hot filly, but we just took our time and nurtured here, and now she’s really sweet.
“She’s had a number of trials and preparations, we just kept educating her, taking it step by step. She told us when she was ready, in the feed bin and in the way she looked, and she’s done a great job.”
O’Brien has kept in touch with McDonald since the pair transacted on the filly, as the trainer educated her through three preparations before the one involving a race.
And O’Brien knew there were those who had their doubts about McDonald running her in a Group 3 last Saturday – which she only made as sole emergency, following a debut third on Bendigo Cup day.
“I did have a few people in my ear,” McDonald said, “but I thought she was in really good form, her work leading into it was terrific, and she looked great.
“There was nothing to lose in running her. If we won, we hit the jackpot. If we placed, she was stakes-placed, and could’ve still gone to an Inglis maiden in two weeks’ time at Werribee.”
Jasmin Rouge went with “jackpot”.
Meanwhile, Segenhoe modified the formula a little with Sweetener in 2022, and now has what O’Brien calls an “absolutely outstanding” yearling filly by the aforementioned So You Think. She won’t be going to Premier, but to Magic Millions Gold Coast.
