Keeping an open mind to avoid shadows of doubt
Stakes races to shape breeders’ mating decisions on eve of 2023 season
The stakes race results in the coming weeks can heavily influence breeders’ perceptions of stallions and the emergence of a good horse can have the phones of stud nomination teams ringing off the hook.
If the entries for Saturday’s three-year-old stakes races in Sydney and Melbourne are any guide, they also demonstrate that, when it comes to unproven stallions, breeders should keep an open mind before putting a red pen through particular sires.
The Silver Shadow Stakes (Gr 2, 1200m) in Sydney this weekend for three-year-old fillies has potential representation of the first crop of The Autumn Sun (Redoute’s Choice), including the return of Black Opal Stakes (Gr 3, 1200m) winner Autumn Ballet, while the now Yarraman Park-based resident Brave Smash (Tosen Phantom) also has the promising Kimochi nominated.
Trained by Gary Portelli, Kimochi is also nominated for the Quezette Stakes (Gr 3, 1100m) at Caulfield in Melbourne on Saturday, as are the progeny of Santos (I Am Invincible) and Showtime (Snitzel) via Group 1-winning Kiwi filly Ulanova and stakes winner Show Royale respectively.
Harry Angel’s (Dark Angel) Ouroboros is nominated at Caulfield for the colts and geldings version, the Vain Stakes (Gr 3, 1100m), as is the unbeaten Scheelite, a son of Arrowfield’s Real Steel (Deep Impact), who shuttled for just one season to the Hunter Valley in 2019 before not being brought back in 2021 after the Covid-missed season in 2020.
Real Steel has had three winners from 13 runners so far with his southern hemisphere-bred crop of 51 live foals.
Cranbourne trainer Ken Keys, who paid $80,000 for Scheelite at the 2022 Magic Millions Adelaide Yearling Sale, admitted to being quite oblivious to the record of the colt’s Japanese sire Real Steel.
“He was just a really nice horse, simple as that, and I knew nothing particularly about the stallion – I buy on type and he was a good type of horse,” Keys told ANZ Bloodstock News yesterday.
“But there haven’t been too many bad stallions in Japan, so I thought it was a fair assumption [Real Steel] would be OK.”
Keys was also happy with Scheelite’s closing second to Group 3 winner Magic Time (Hellbent) over 800 metres in a Cranbourne barrier trial on August 7.
“Obviously the winner’s a pretty fast horse [Magic Time], which is probably an understatement, but he [Scheelite] did everything asked of him and he’s come back well,” the trainer said.
“I think there’s quite a bit more to come; I think he’ll get a mile, he comes across as quite a relaxed horse, not necessarily in the mounting yard, but in riding and this is a starting point for him.”
Coolmore’s champion first season sire Justify (Scat Daddy) has the Ciaron Maher and David Eustace-trained Warrnambool winner Scentify nominated for the Vain Stakes, while Swettenham Stud’s one-season shuttler Sioux Nation, another son of the late, great Scat Daddy (Johannesburg), has also made an early impression with his first crop of Australian-breds.
Sioux Nation’s unraced daughter Siovy Dane could make an audacious start to her racing career after being nominated for the Silver Shadow at Randwick on the back of an impressive barrier trial win for her Warwick Farm trainer Robert Quinn and owner-breeder Doug Walker.
So far, nine of the 39 southern hemisphere-bred Sioux Nations have raced, five of them winning a race, while his crop also includes maiden filly Apache Song, who achieved black-type status in April when she placed in the Redoute’s Choice Stakes (Listed, 1200m) for trainer Michael Trotter.
Swettenham Stud’s Adam Sangster lamented at the 2019 stallion parade on his Nagambie property when Sioux Nation’s book of mares halved in the space of days and the small number making it unviable for the Coolmore-owned stallion to return for a second year.
He had vowed to let his disappointment about Sioux Nation rest, but he received another reminder of what could have been when the Mark and Levi Kavanagh-trained Lakota Fire made it two wins in succession with a victory at Moonee Valley last Saturday.
“He was Victoria’s champion first season sire from a low base of 39 foals, he’s done a really good job down here,” Sangster said of Sioux Nation yesterday.
“It is bittersweet but it’s satisfying to see that our and Coolmore’s judgement was vindicated, but the fact that he didn’t get the support was a damn shame when the European breeders flocked to him [early on].”
He added: “Before our stallion parade on 28th of August, 2019, we had 90 mares booked into him and by the end of the week we had 50 and my nominations team phoned me up and said, ‘we can’t put all our energy into Sioux Nation because word is on the street that there’s a fault’ and we only got 50 mares into him and the rest of history.”
Sangster’s experience with Sioux Nation also prompted a change to the format of the Swettenham stallion parades.
Instead of having one big event in front of all Swettenham’s clients and breeders, Sangster this year has opted for smaller groups, allowing more conversation and head off any potential ill-founded perceptions of the horses on the Victorian farm’s roster.
That said, he knows results on the racecourse over the next three months will see breeders either solidify or change their mating decisions, something which occurred in 2022 with shuttler Wooded (Wootton Bassett), the winner of the Prix de l’Abbaye de Longchamp (Gr 1, 5f).
“Last year, he was sailing past the 120 mark [for mares] and then Jacquinot came out [and won the Golden Rose] and Shades Of Rose came out [and won four straight], so people switched from a first-season sire to a proven sire in Rubick and it just shows how fickle the market is because the year before Rubick got 42 mares and last year he got 156 mares,” Sangster said.
“[In 2019] Puissance De Lune had 20 mares booked to him and then he had Moonlight Maid win the Edward Manifold and he went from 20 to 150 mares.”