SADLER'S WELLS RIDING HIGH

Sadler’s Wells
(Painting : Susan Crawford)

LEADING SIRES
BY 2011 NORTHERN HEMISPHERE
GRADE/GROUP 1 WINNERS

Standing in U.S. and Europe

Stallion	Sire	G1 Winner
Galileo (Ire)	Sadler’s Wells	10
Montjeu (Ire)	Sadler’s Wells	8
Giant’s Causeway (USA)	Storm Cat	3
High Chaparral (Ire)	Sadler’s Wells	3
Mr. Greeley (USA)	Gone West	3
Oasis Dream (GB)	Green Desert	3
Dalakhani (Ire)	Darshaan	2
Danehill Dancer (Ire)	Danehill	2
Dubawi (Ire)	Dubai Millennium	2
Dynaformer (USA)	Roberto	2
Empire Maker (USA)	Unbridled	2
Exceed and Excel (Aus)	Danehill	2
Hawk Wing (USA)	Woodman	2
Lomitas (GB)	Niniski	2
Medaglia d’Oro (USA)	El Prado	2
Mineshaft (USA)	A.P. Indy	2
More Than Ready (USA)	Southern Halo	2
Northern Afleet (USA)	Afleet	2
Refuse To Bend (Ire)	Sadler’s Wells	2
Sakhee (USA)	Bahri	2
Samum (Ger)	Monsun	2
Selkirk (USA)	Sharpen Up	2
Smart Strike (USA)	Mr. Prospector	2
Tapit (USA)	Pulpit	2
Tiznow (USA)	Cee’s Tizzy	2
War Front (USA)	Danzig	2

Correct as at 21 November 2011 (Thoroughbred Daily News)

FULFILLING PEDIGREE POTENTIAL

Sadler’s Wells and Darshaan
(Image : Sport Horse Data/Aga Khan Studs)

PEDIGREE INSIGHTS
Andrew Caulfield

For investors in high-class bloodstock, there was something very reassuring about the results of all three European Classics contested over the weekend. They all fell to animals that were fulfilling the Classic potential of both sides of pedigrees, as all three are by stallions with previous Classic winners to their credit, and all three come from families that had produced winners of the Epsom Derby or Oaks.

The Investec Oaks went to Dancing Rain, who became the first mile-and-a-half Classic winner for Danehill Dancer, following his Group 1 Classic successes over a mile with Speciosa, Again and Mastercraftsman. Dancing Rain also became the third female Classic winner out of a daughter of Indian Ridge, this particular daughter of Indian Ridge being Rain Flower, a three-parts sister to the 1992 Epsom Derby winner Dr Devious.

Next in the sequence came Pour Moi, whose startling last-to-first effort provided Montjeu with his third winner of the Investec Derby in the space of seven years. Those seven years have also seen three other Montjeu colts win the Irish Derby and another two win the Grand Prix de Paris (many people’s idea of France’s true equivalent to the Derby). Consequently, Montjeu has unrivaled claims to being Europe’s most prolific source of mile-and-a-half Classic colts.

Pour Moi’s third dam is Northern Dancer’s famous daughter Royal Statute, who also ranks as the second dam of Snow Bride, the filly awarded the 1989 Oaks prior to becoming the dam of the 1995 Derby winner Lammtarra.

Finally, the Prix du Jockey-Club fell to the unbeaten Reliable Man, whose sire Dalakhani won the same race in the days before its distance was shortened. Some would argue that victory should have gone to another son of Dalakhani, the slow-starting Baraan, but that doesn’t change the fact that Dalakhani now has three Classic winners from his first four crops, the others being Conduit (St Leger) and Moonstone (Irish Oaks). Dalakhani’s crops haven’t been as large as those of some of his rivals - his three Classic winners come from a total of 288 foals in his first four crops.

Reliable Man’s Classic connection on his dam’s side comes from his second dam Fair Salinia, winner of the Oaks in 1978 before adding the Irish equivalent with the help of the stewards.

The other common denominator between Pour Moi and Reliable Man is the presence in their pedigrees of Sadler’s Wells and his old rival Darshaan. Whereas Pour Moi is by a son of Sadler’s Wells and has a dam by Darshaan, Reliable Man is by a son of Darshaan and has a dam by Sadler’s Wells.

Extract from Thoroughbred Daily News

THE GREAT DEBATE : PART 2

(Photo : Horse Magazine/Thoroughbred Heritage)

THE RELEVANCE OF NICKS
by Alan Porter 

Alan Porter of TrueNicks responds to the Tony Morris article on nicking.

It would be fair to say that Tony Morris has been the doyen of British commentators on breeding since I was a school boy, a statement that is put into perspective by the fact that I’m now well on the way into my sixth decade.

Consequently, I would be second to none in my regard for his knowledge of breeding and racing history, but I do have to disagree with his recent column “The Debatable Importance Of The Nick”, where he refers to nicking as “a flawed concept” that has become “the new Figure System, a nonsense foisted on an industry whose gullibility remains much as it was when Bruce Lowe presented fiction as fact over a century ago”.

Before there is a chorus of “He would say that, wouldnʼt he?” I will make it clear that Iʼm not an unbiased observer.

Along with Byron Rogers, Iʼm co-designer of the , and with The Blood-Horse Publications in America, we are co-owners of the TrueNicks programme. With that bias now declared, it must be further stated that if there wasnʼt clear and compelling evidence for itʼs value, this nick rating system at least, would not have seen the light of day.

I havenʼt worked in the industry quite as long as Tony, but Iʼve been aware of nicks and the potential usefulness of an opportunity based nicking programme for many, many years.

As an eminent turf historian, it is no surprise to see Tony raise the crosses of Bend Or with Macaroni mares and Phalaris on Chaucer mares as examples of nicks, but it is surprising to see him then dismiss their significance as a product of propinquity (or to put it another way, the cross did well because it was tried a lot, and in these specific cases, tried a lot with high-class material). At this point, weʼd have to counter by saying that it takes a lot more than frequency, even with the best material, to make a successful nick.

If propinquity were the sole requirement, then the Buckpasser / Bold Ruler cross would have been a stellar combination, the mighty Buckpasser retiring to Claiborne Farm, where Bold Ruler held court as North Americaʼs dominant sire. Well, Buckpasser did sire 1,000 Guineas heroine Quick as Lightning out of a mare by Bold Ruler, but it took 33 foals on the cross to get her, one other Stakes winner and a bunch of complete nonentities.

Evaluating the cross from a statistical viewpoint, it was a profound “anti-nick” with Buckpasser siring 16% Stakes winners to starters out of all other mares and Bold Ruler mares producing 10% Stakes winners to all other stallions, while the Buckpasser / Bold Ruler cross resulted in 8% Stakes winners to starters. In fact, the cross produced 0.42 (or less than half) as many Stakes winners as one would have expected on the basis of what the main protagonists did when covered by other sires and broodmare sires.

It is impossible to conduct the same precise analysis on the Bend Or / Macaroni or Phalaris / Chaucer crosses, but it is still easy enough to form a conclusion as to whether or not a true affinity existed. The book Racehorse Breeding Theories suggests that Bend Or sired about 25% of his foals out of mares by Macaroni.

Using Great Thoroughbred Sires of the World as a guide, Bend Or sired 19 horses that would now be the equivalent of Stakes winners. Nine of these (48%) were out of mares by Macaroni, including seven of the top ten. Remove the horses that Bend Or sired out of Macaroni mares from his record and there would be no Ormonde who, as Tony says, was greatest runner of the 19th century, nor Bona Vista, the male line ancestor of Phalaris. With a strike-rate getting on for twice that of opportunity and the quality of the best foals bred on the cross, there is not much doubt that Bend Or / Macaroni qualifies as a genuine positive nick.

Moving on to Bona Vistaʼs great-grandson, Phalaris, Racehorse Breeding Theories suggests that around 15% of his offspring were out of Chaucer mares. Yet the cross produced eleven of the 36 Phalaris offspring that would be regarded equivalent to Stakes winners, which is 30%, or twice as many as might have been expected.

Granted, he did get Derby and 2,000 Guineas victor Manna, and the Oaks heroine Chatelaine, out of non-Chaucer mares, but take out Fairway, Pharos, Fair Isle, Colorado, Caerleon, Sickle, and Pharamond II (all out of Chaucer mares), youʼd be left with Plantago, Warden of the Marshes and Museum – good horses in their day, but scarcely names that echo down the corridors of time – as the best of the rest of his get. In fact, if you remove the horses he sired out of mares by Chaucer, you might even conclude that the influence of Phalaris on the breed would be negligible.

In the case of the modern nick of Sadlerʼs Wells / Darshaan, it is possible to be very precise. Taking the percentage of Stakes winners sired by

Sadlerʼs Wells out of all other mares and the percentage of Stakes winners produced by the Darshaan mares with offspring by Sadlerʼs Wells when bred to all other stallions, we find that the Sadlerʼs Wells / Darshaan cross produced 4.5 times the percentage of Stakes winners as the individuals concerned did when bred to all other mates.

While the trio of crosses mentioned above are some of the best-known nicks, there are in fact any number of sire / broodmare crosses that have demonstrably outperformed opportunity, producing a considerably higher proportion of Stakes winners, than have the same sires and broodmare sires when bred to all other sires and broodmare sires.

That is not a theory, just a plain statement of fact.

Tony also casts doubt on the genetic basis for nicks, stating that, “No parent transmits the same set of genes at every mating”. While that is undoubtedly true, it is also clear that for example, a son or daughter of Sadlerʼs Wells out of a mare by Darshaan will have a potential gene pool, which in the immediate generations is a minimum of 75% identical to that owned by High Chaparral, Ebadiyla, Yesterday, Islington, et al, and therefore much more likely to inherit similar beneficial gene-groupings than the offspring of Sadlerʼs Wells, with, for example, Habitat or Alleged. Given the various forms of genetic interaction potentially caused by epistasis, polymorphisms, ex-expression and other factors that do not correspond to a simpleMendelianmodel, it would take very few genes (or more probably genegroups) to be passed on relatively consistently from the sire and broodmare sire for positive factors for athletic performance to inherited with considerable frequency (and when we consider that the Sadlerʼs Wells / Darshaan cross has produced better than 24% Stakes winners to runners from no less than 110 starters, it is a pretty logical supposition). With regard to crosses involving sirelines and broodmare sirelines, it is clear that the specific genetic contribution from the initial ancestor is likely to decrease with every generation removed.

However, one of the most surprising things we discovered when calibrating TrueNicks on a population of over 100,000 horses, is the correlation between Stakes success and a high-nick rating does not significantly decrease with distance removed.

It is likely what is reflected is not individual genetic contribution, but the tendency for sire lines to have similar affinities. This might be best expressed by a simple analogy with algebra.

If sire A does well with mares by both B and C, there are good chances that B and C might well have shared affinities, thus a stallion bred on a cross of A and B, might do well with mares by C, and a stallion bred on a cross of A and C might do well with mares by B. Therefore if we look at the strike-rate of all Sadlerʼs Wells sons with mares by Darshaan we find that the strike-rate is still well in excess of 10% Stakes winners to starters, even though it involves some less than stellar Sadlerʼs Wells sons, such as King of Kings and Entrepreneur (in fact, the cross has done more than five times as well as would have been expected, taking into account frequency and class).

Moving from nicks to nick ratings : Tony calls the concept of a nick (and presumably, by association, a broader sire line/broodmare sire line affinity) a theory. In fact an opportunity-based nick rating is no more a theory than is a ruler. It is simply a measure of what has happened when a sire or sireline has been crossed by mares by a broodmare sire or from broodmare sireline.

Tony concludes by urging breeders to “concentrate on the practical rather than the theoretical if they are serious about producing high-quality racehorses”.

Tony and I are not without some common ground. Where we concur is that the problems start when people begin to try and breed nick ratings rather than racehorses.

The nick, which itself should be subject to intelligent interpretation regarding the quality and type of Stakes winners produced, is but one component of a successful mating. From a pedigree standpoint, along with consideration of potentially beneficial inbreeding and line breeding (which again can be now often statistically evaluated), it helps create a short-list of potential sires, but there are a myriad of other factors that enter the equation, among them potential aptitude, conformation, temperament and, more often than not, commercial factors. There are times when one compelling element, or a number of elements lead us to chose a cross that is not necessarily particularly highly-rated, but at least that decision can be made with full possession of the relevant information.

That some sires and sirelines cross more successfully with certain broodmare sires and broodmare sirelines – and vice versa – is not a theory, but a simple and easily demonstrated fact. An opportunity-based nick rating simply acknowledges that fact, and reflects the degree of success relative to frequency of attempts and class of material used.

Extract from European Bloodstock News

THE GREAT DEBATE : PART 1

(Photo : Thoroughbred Heritage / Famous Racehorses)

THE DEBATABLE IMPORTANCE OF THE NICK
By Tony Morris 

A few months ago there were lively exchanges on the internet involving different parties who professed to have the best data on nicks. And as these were commercial operations, seeking to sell their data, it was not so surprising that the arguments became heated; vitriol was being tossed around in the manner lately so tediously dispensed by Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg.

The political party leaders have struggled to sell their philosophies and policies to an understandably cynical public who have become no more enlightened as they have sought to rubbish one another’s ideas. The electorate made up its mind earlier this month by going for the apparently least worst option.

Just who won the argument between the nicks merchants is unclear, but to this observer it hardly mattered. Am I supposed to care about whose version of a flawed concept acquired the most adherents? Nicks have become the new Figure System,  nonsense foisted on an industry whose gullibility remains much as it was when Bruce Lowe presented fiction as fact over a century ago.

The trouble is that in the uncertain world of Thoroughbred breeding everyone wants to be able to believe in something. People don’t want to accept the random nature of genetic inheritance and are susceptible to any theory that a smart salesman can make seem plausible. There are those who still adhere to Lowe’s ludicrous ideas; dosage continues to exercise a pernicious influence on some; advocates of deep linebreeding still have their followers; and the notion of nicks has been so strongly promoted as reality that new converts readily buy into it on a daily basis.

What is a nick? It is generally understood to be an affinity between two unrelated individuals – most often, but not exclusively, a sire and broodmare sire – recognized through a higher rate of success than expectancy. There are a couple of examples from history, which always tend to be cited as proofs of the phenomenon, one each from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The earlier of those examples concerned a pair of Derby winners, the 1880 hero Bend Or and Macaroni, successful in 1863. Examine the records, and it is hard to deny that they did terribly well together, the former as sire, the latter as broodmare sire.

Between them they delivered the best horse of the nineteenth century in unbeaten Ormonde, a son of Bend Or out of Macaroni’s daughter Lily Agnes, and he was one of a number of high-class performers bred to the same pattern.

In the 1920’s there came another prominent instance, involving Phalaris and Chaucer, again as respectively sire and broodmare sire. Among those who advertised that cross as a powerful nick were the brothers Pharos and Fairway, both important sires as well as superior runners, Classic winners Colorado and Fair Isle, Pharamond and Sickle, not quite top-notchers on the racecourse but important as sires in North America, and the Eclipse Stakes winner Caerleon. The alliance proclaimed itself as a sure-fire recipe for success.

And of course, in our own time nobody can have failed to notice how well Sadler’s Wells seemed to have been matched with daughters of Darshaan, and indeed with daughters of Darshaan’s sire, Shirley Heights. The combination clicked early, was soon picked up as a formula for producing a high-class runner, and breeders were not slow to make it a highly fashionable cross. It worked on a regular basis, and by doing so it proved significant in promoting the idea of nicks as a viable plan for delivering success.

People will believe what they want to believe, especially if they feel in need of a belief system, and it can certainly be argued that the examples cited above tend to suggest that nicks do occur. It is not a theory that may be as readily dismissed as Bruce Lowe’s family numbers, for instance.

But it still has its own element of hocus-pocus. I recall a discussion on nicks – specifically those involving Bend Or and Macaroni and Phalaris and Chaucer – with one of my early mentors, Humphrey Finney, an eminent stud manager with a profound knowledge of pedigrees, who wound up as boss of Fasig-Tipton, and whose memory is now preserved in the name of the sales pavilion at Saratoga. Finney pooh poohed the idea of nicks and had one word to account for the success of those crosses – propinquity.

It was a fair point in both cases. The first Duke of Westminster was the owner of Bend Or, and his broodmare band included some of the best-bred daughters of Macaroni; evidence for the supposed nick came exclusively from products of the Duke’s Eaton Stud. But would the Duke have recognised a special affinity there, something to be exploited for all it was worth? Hardly.

Macaroni was, rather like Primera, renowned chiefly for his daughters. He did get a winner of the Gr1 2,000 Guineas in Macgregor, but that one was an exception to the rule that defined him as principally a sire of notable fillies. Unsurprisingly, many breeders fancied that Macaroni would excel as a broodmare sire, and he duly did. It was understandable that the Duke would elect to put his Macaroni mares to Bend Or when the latter went to stud; what better notion could he have for enhancing the prospects of his young stallion?

Examine the record and a few pertinent facts emerge.

Yes, Bend Or’s record as a sire did seem to deteriorate as the supply of Macaroni mares dried up, but one of his best sons, as runner and sire, came late in Radium, who had no Macaroni connection. It is also apparent that Macaroni’s reputation as a broodmare sire by no means depended on links with Bend Or; he clicked with sires from a wide variety of backgrounds.

It was a similar story with Phalaris and Chaucer, both products of the Derby family’s Stanley Stud. Yes, it is an undoubted fact that they thrived in combination, as the examples mentioned above clearly demonstrate. But it was not as though Phalaris owed all of his success at stud to daughters of Chaucer; he had plenty of high-class representatives with no Chaucer connection.

As for Chaucer’s record as a broodmare sire, his own best daughter – on the racecourse as well as at stud – was Selene, who delivered Pharamond and Sickle to matings with Phalaris, but whose undying fame was assured by the great Hyperion, her son by Gainsborough.

Coming right up to date, who can doubt that Sadler’s Wells has been a great sire, with or without his products from daughters of Darshaan? And is not Darshaan an outstanding broodmare sire per se? It is not just what his daughters have produced in combination with Sadler’s Wells that have made him a success in that role.

My point is that, even in cases such as these, which have resulted in numerous successes, the notion of the nick is not a concept warranting confidence in its reality. No parent transmits the same set of genes at every mating, and on that basis alone there are plenty of reasons for doubting the theory.

While research is ongoing and there is still much to learn, geneticists are currently among the doubters on the subject of nicks. All they will say at present is that if nicks exist, they are far less common than is widely credited.

And that makes all the recent rowing – between parties who take no account of how genes behave – over a phenomenon of dubious existence, nothing but an unseemly and futile exercise.

Nicks are not the be-all and end-all of breeding, as some with data to sell would have us believe. Not content with trying to persuade us of effective links between sire and broodmare sire, they suggest affinities between certain sire lines, and every big winner supposedly emerges as the outcome of a pattern discernible in its pedigree and therefore suggestive of emulation.

While I can see plenty of reasons why a breeder might want to drill for oil where oil has previously been found, it is wise to remember that every horse is an individual rather than a conformist to a theory that some salesmen choose to peddle. Good horses, like bad horses and indifferent horses, spring from all manner of backgrounds, and genetics – which you may translate as pedigree – contributes no more than about 35 per cent to performance in any case.

Breeders are well advised to concentrate on the practical rather than the theoretical if they are serious about producing high-quality racehorses.

Part 2 follows later in the week.

Extract from European Bloodstock News

BILL OPPENHEIM : Blinded by the light

Bill Oppenheim A few weeks ago I was privileged to be included among a panel of speakers at the ITBA Trade Fair at Goffs. It was a heavyweight lineup, too. I’m sure my journalistic colleague and co-panelist Leo Powell, editor of The Irish Field, won’t be offended when I say he and I were rather wondering what we were doing up there on the platform with Denis Brosnan, Chairman of Horse Racing Ireland; Nic Coward and Winfried Engelbrecht-Breges, CEO’s of the British Horse Racing Authority and the Hong Kong Jockey Club, respectively. Needless to say, Leo acquitted himself brilliantly, and the other speakers were as interesting and thought-provoking as we’d expected.

The Trade Fair was sponsored by the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association, chaired by Joe Hernon, and it was co-ordinated by Eddie O’Grady’s daughter, the excellent Amber Byrne. There were 85 booths, and Goffs was teeming with people. It’s an amazing country, Ireland. It’s the only place I know where, when somebody happens to make some serious money (which quite a few Irish have been doing over the last decade), the first thing they think about buying is a horse. We could use a few dozen more countries like that.

One of the most popular booths at the Fair, by all accounts, was that of the G1 Goldmine pedigree website manned by Australian software developer Leo Tsatsaronis. Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to see the seminar he presented, but there were so many people trying to get in they brought him back for an encore the next afternoon. I was sorry I didn’t get to meet him; there’s always room for good information, and by all accounts the information their website provides is very good. In fact, there’s an interesting review by Nancy Sexton, in Monday’s Racing Post, of G1 Goldmine and the new Blood-Horse-sponsored Truenicks, co-produced by another Australian, Byron Rogers, with Alan Porter. Both products do represent advances in certain respects, as far as I can tell, certainly in the range of the databases they tap into. But, as somebody who also works in the field of pedigree analysis, I’m not convinced that either or both is the Holy Grail they’re being cracked up to be. I’m probably somewhat biased, being a competitor, or at least a rival of sorts, but the truth is I’m not at all convinced this rush to measure and index opportunity, in the one case (Truenicks), or indexing individual crosses, as is cited in Nancy’s article about the other, really are “the answer.” I realize both programs do a lot more, and I’m sure both are very useful tools.

But is “Compton Place over Night Shift” (index 71.93) really a better cross than “Sadler’s Wells over Darshaan” (index 2.26)? It’s simply that Compton Place has had several early successes over Night Shift, from a very small sample size. Sod’s Law, as well as the Law of Averages and the Laws of Probability, virtually guarantee that the next 50 times it’s tried, the results won’t be as impressive. It’s the same sort of rush of fashion as we saw when Believe It had early successes over the Raise a Native line, or when Storm Bird had Storm Cat (in his first crop) out of a Secretariat mare. Storm Cat was a foal of 1983, and in 1987-1988 Storm Bird had three more A Runners out of Secretariat mares, including Summer Squall (whose dam produced A.P. Indy two years later) and Mujadil. I don’t know how many Secretariat mares were bred to Storm Bird in his ensuing 11 crops, but I can tell you how many more A Runners there were bred on that cross: zero. And that’s my problem with measuring opportunity: when the sample size is so small (evidently, too small), early successes may mean not that this is a great nick, but that whatever successes this cross was going to have happened to come early.

I have no doubt success rates drop as the numbers bred on that cross increase, and these raw measurements of opportunity don’t take that into account, since as far as I know nobody has done that research (yet). Moreover, when you consider even ABC Runners are only 8 percent of the population, the odds are stacked against success. It’s no wonder the trend lines flatten as the number of cases increase.

All this is also by way of explaining why we don’t do APEX ratings on freshman sires; those early successes can be misleading. Even doing them on sires with three-year-olds and four-year-olds, we routinely see sires ring up huge early numbers, which then naturally contract as they have more, and more older, runners. The first year A.P. Indy was rated, his A Runner Index was over 9.00. Eventually it has settled to around the 5.00 mark, which is still the best there is. Distorted Humor, whose oldest foals were seven in 2007, has now dropped below 4.00 for the first time.

Significantly, though, even as the numbers (usually) fall, the top sires tend to hold their positions among their “sire classes” (sires with first foals the same year). Consequently, we find with the younger sire classes-in this case, sires with first foals 2003 (oldest four-year-olds of 2007) and 2004 (oldest three-year-olds)-it is as important to look at their total numbers of “A” and “ABC” Runners as at their indexes. So we present eight Top 20 tables in this issue, four each for F2003 and F2004 sires: number of A and ABC Runners as well as the leaders by A Index and ABC Index. In terms of number of A Runners and ABC Runners 2005 2007, Galileo, Broken Vow, and City Zip rank one-two-three on both lists, in that order. The two leaders by A Runner Index are two Florida sires (each with roughly half the number of year-starters as Galileo): Exchange Rate (3.55), who has now emigrated to Three Chimneys Farm in Kentucky; and Put It Back (3.42). The latter, who is surely the biggest bargain in Florida this year at $7,500, leads the list by ABC Runner Index (2.23), over two sires whose runners have all been sired in New York to date, City Zip (2.17, now at Lane’s End in Kentucky), and Giant’s Causeway’s little brother, Freud.

In what looks like a pretty salty group of F2004 sires, Coolmore sires Johannesburg (12) and Rock of Gibraltar (10) head the list, perhaps not surprisingly, considering they are the two with the highest number of runners. Darley’s Street Cry (nine) comes next, followed by Officer and Invincible Spirit (eight each), and Orientate (seven). In terms of A Runner Index, the list is led by the unheralded Val Royal (3.62), still only a ,10,000 stallion at The National Stud in Britain, when he gets back into service, followed by Street Cry (3.33), Pure Prize (3.16), Sakhee (2.86), Officer (2.80), and E Dubai (2.72). Johannesburg, Rock of Gibraltar, and Invincible Spirit (all with more year-starters) also rate in the 2.00’s. Invincible Sprit and Rock of Gibraltar are tied for the lead by number of ABC Runners, with 28 each, ahead of Officer and Johannesburg, each with 24; Include (21); Orientate (20); and Street Cry (19). E Dubai (2.17) is tops by ABC Runner Index, ahead of Officer (2.10).

Extract from Thoroughbred Daily News