Stormbourg puts the torch on Rosemont’s young gun
When the John Moloney-trained Stormbourg provided first-season sire Strasbourg (I Am Invincible) with his first winner when scoring at Ballarat yesterday, it was somewhat of a bittersweet moment for Rosemont Stud as principal Anthony Mithen and his team at the stud.
Rosemont has always maintained faith in 2019 BRC Sires’ Produce Stakes (Gr 2, 1400m) winner Strasbourg and Mithen was imploring breeders to get behind the stallion this year, his fourth season, at a modest fee of $8,800 (inc GST).
But as so often happens, the breeding season hasn’t been smooth sailing for Strasbourg after a virus knocked him around in late September and into October.
“Antibiotics are never great for fertility, so we’ve had to be a bit patient and ask breeders to be a bit patient with him,” Mithen said.
“His season hasn’t been without its challenges, but thankfully I think he’s got eight of the last 11 or 12 mares have tested in foal, so he’s over that speed hump, which is great, because there’s no doubt it’ll affect his numbers this year.
“We were upfront with breeders and we didn’t want them to suffer by ending up with empty mares, so there was some swapping and changing going on during that period.”
Moloney trained an early race-to-race double at Ballarat, with three-year-old Nation State (All Too Hard) winning a 1000-metre maiden before the Rosemont-born and raised Stormbourg won the following race for two-year-olds.
Ridden by Carleen Hefel, Stormbourg maintained a run down the far-side rail and came home well to defeat Albertville (Ilovethiscity) by a half-length with a further head back to Invincible Beau (Brazen Beau) in third place.
“It’s very special. I congratulate all the people involved in this horse. They bred it, kept the mother, and sent her to Strasbourg to produce this horse,” Cranbourne-based Moloney said.
“He has been lovely to deal with from day one. We could have sold him, but they decided to breed from the mare; it’s a tricky game and this is her first foal.
“He did his jump-out well, but predicting what he might do is hard. He is like a little kid at home and acts like nothing happened. So he does not give a feeling that he goes out and goes boom.”
Meanwhile, Mithen added that he rated Strasbourg as the ‘dark horse’ among the group of stallions with their first runners this season and said he had received positive feedback from trainers who have yearlings by the son of I Am Invincible (Invincible Spirit) in their stables.
“He’s probably the sleeper in the pack of those first season stallions,” said Mithen. “There’s no hype, no pressure, no talk but quietly there’s a few trainers around that are saying, ‘gee, I like the Strasbourg I’ve got’ and almost saying it in surprise, but there should be no surprise, he’s a Group-winning colt, a son of I Am Invincible that looks like a rock star.”
In his first season in the breeding barn, Strasbourg covered 109 mares, producing 84 live foals at a fee of $11,000 (inc GST).