THOROUGHBRED BREEDING : ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

Foveros
(Photo : SportHorse-Data)

“A good pedigree belongs to a good horse.”
Terrance Millard

Mick Goss
Summerhill Stud CEOAs South African breeders contemplate life without Jet Master, inevitably our thoughts turn to alternatives, and because Jet Master was more mongrel than blood, we ask ourselves what constitutes a good pedigree. I asked the many-times champion trainer, Terrance Millard that question while he was inspecting yearlings for the TBA some fifteen years ago, and his answer was short (and to the point), “I’ve been in this game more than fifty years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a good pedigree belongs to a good horse”.

Humbug attends arguments about horse breeding the way an egret dwells on a tick-blown ox. Another great South African stallion of more than two decades ago, Foveros, unfashionably bred and stained yellow by the summer sun, rampaged as a racehorse through the Cape Town season like a wounded buffalo through the reeds. As always, you go home and pour over his pedigree. You go back six generations, and you look through 126 ancestors. No neon lights flash, there is no grand clue. That’s alright. Racing would be as interesting as quantum physics if it were burdened with mathematical certainty. You’re happy to conclude that Foveros, like Jet Master, had something greater than blood and conformation. They had the great tick of the heart. In sport that’s enough: rare talents are rarely fathomable.

Nonsense, says the breeding purist, who bails you up at the races the next week. It is the usual confrontation. The theorist is vaguely hysterical. You are vaguely surly and pretend you need to go to the tote. The interrogation begins. “Didn’t you see all that Hyperion in the pedigree? Three doses of it. Three! And Hyperion’s close relative All Moonshine, is in there too”. I recall the fact to him that I’ve bred many horses with that many doses of Hyperion’s family, with less than inspiring outcomes. You ask yourself why these buffs can’t tell you these things in advance, before Foveros and Jet Master became famous. We could’ve cleaned up at long odds. Truth is, they can’t, and it’s all rather tiresome. I’m sure that when Pat Devine picked Jet Master as a foal at the old Natal Mare and Weanling Sale, she hadn’t bothered to check the co-efficiency of the colt’s inbreeding.

We don’t assail our clients with dosage or linebreeding theories here at Summerhill, but we breed and raise top-class winners by the hundreds. Over at Highlands, when Graham Beck presided over the champion stallions, National Assembly, Jallad and Badger Land, all at one time, they didn’t discuss their success in terms of the “international outcross” their pedigrees represented. Both farms have owned the national breeders’ title many times.

We are, therefore, in favour of anyone who can offer serious thoughts about breeding without the humbug. Someone who knows about the caprices of nature as well as the laws of Mendel, someone who knows that nothing can make a fool of you more comprehensively than a thoroughbred. Which is why I’ve always been greatly taken (and impressed) by the simple logic of Thoroughbred Breeding: Notes and Comments. Its author, Sir Mordaunt Milner, cuts through humbug like a flail mulcher.

Milner failed at Leeds University because he went to the races instead of to lectures. He then immigrated to South Africa where he was a stipendiary steward, a novelist, a breeder of classic winners, and sales-topping yearlings. The back dust-jacket of the book catches Milner’s breezy fatalism. It shows him bridling his riding hack. The caption says “This filly was bought as a yearling in a season before her full brother won the New Zealand Derby - what good luck! She never won a race: she never had a foal, what bad luck! That’s racing”. Do not be misled. The book is a considerable piece of scholarship. It brings a fresh mind and a deft pen to all the usual things: nicks and crosses, prepotency, dosages, how to select a mare and how to find the right mate for her. It is never boring, never superficial. But you always have the feeling that here was a man who had read all the books and knew all the theory, but who had also stood in a paddock, looked at a sad little foal who was all wrong, and said to himself there is a time when all this theory is “bunk”.

Here are a few of his smartest observations:

• “When a mare is offered for sale one frequently reads the following sort of comment beneath the displayed pedigree: ‘The next dam is So and So, a daughter of Thingamabob tracing to Paraffin’. This means the mare will have the famous mare Paraffin (1870) in the eighth or ninth generation and the influence will be as remote as an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower to his or her descendant in the Senate or in the Bowery… This sort of announcement is as meaningless as putting the family number after the name of a horse. It is… a lot of bull.”
• “At a poultry show, a young fancier asked what was the difference between inbreeding and line-breeding. An older one answered: ‘Well son, it’s this way. If you keep on breeding with your own birds and you are successful, you speak of line-breeding. But, if your results are bad, you can blame it on inbreeding’.”
• “The commercial breeder has to breed a yearling that can walk well enough to satisfy the buyers; whether it can gallop as well is then the buyer’s problem”.
• “If you’re going back seven generations to support a theory, you might as well go back eight”.
• “There is no relationship between size and ability on the racecourse, but one thing is sure: there is a definite correlation between size and price at the yearling sales”.
• “How many mares do you need to start a stud and how do you choose them? Only one, provided you pick the right one. Both the Childwick Bury and the Aga Khan’s stud would still have been known world-wide if the only mares they had started with had been Absurdity and Mumtaz Mahal”.

As you can see, Milner was a pragmatist, but he pulled up well short of saying that breeding is all luck. His theme is that by sifting the evidence intelligently you can improve your luck. The words of the great American breeder, John Gaines, (whose farm Gainesway, the Beck family owns today) often seemed close to the Milner approach. Gaines once said “It’s really the game of percentages, a game of getting many little things working for you. Every little plus gives you a higher probability than someone else has”. You’ve heard that many times at Summerhill.

The passage I like best in the book belongs not to Milner, but to Phil Bull, founder of Timeform, whose wisdom was also contained in our previous piece entitled ‘From Pauper to Princess’. It goes like this: “Anyone who thinks he can breed a champion by sitting down with a split-pedigree book to find an ideal mating based on inbreeding or crosses of this or that, just isn’t in touch with reality. Every “great” horse is (by definition) a rarity whose superior genetic make-up is the result of a statistically improbable accident. You may hope for and solicit such accidents, nothing more.”

Which brings me back to Foveros. I may have that quotation printed on a card. Next time the breeding theorist hectors me about Foveros and Hyperion, I can simply hand the card to him. On reflection, that won’t work. He is sure to say that Phil Bull is notorious for his lack of knowledge about Hyperion in the fourth generation.

Enquiries :
www.summerhill.co.za

DEATH OF JET MASTER : FAREWELL TO THE LEGEND

Jet Master
(Photo : Racing South Africa)

“And on the third day he rose again…”

Mick Goss
Summerhill Stud CEOOn the very day that “Boeing” unveiled their latest stratospheric invention, the horse by the same name, Jet Master, ascended to the heavens. One thing that’s sure about the passing of Jet Master, is that he’s going upwards, not down. If ever there was one, he was South Africa’s saint of the turf. He didn’t deserve to go the way he did, for all the virtues he represented. He didn’t know his father, and he only briefly knew his mother, but what he did know, was that he was born to run. Few people, besides Pat Devine, saw in him what he turned out to be. At R15,000 South Africa’s most famous weanling purchase, Jet Master belied his origins to become one of the greatest equine athletes of all-time.

His 126 merit rating at the height of his career, placed him squarely among the best racehorses in the world, and in hindsight, it’s a sadness that the age of the international adventures of the likes of Mike de Kock were not yet upon us, when he was strutting his stuff on the racecourses of his homeland.

In so many respects, Jet Master was a triumph over circumstances which might have stopped lesser mortals in their tracks. To begin with, his life was a victory of the plebs over the pedigree patricians, of a struggle with the afflictions of a defective breathing mechanism over the trials of the racecourse, and of the South African-bred stallion over the colonial-era belief that what comes from outside, is better than the inside.

As a young man, he bestrode the racecourses of our land like a colossus, displaying remarkable agility for a horse of his size, and the gatespeed of a quarter horse. He finished off his races in the ruthless fashion we’ve come to expect from All Black rugby teams, yet his retirement to stud was greeted by the usual scepticism about his pedigree (or the lack of it), his wind afflictions, and anything else we could throw at him. In many ways, if it was possible, his career as a stallion exceeded that of his life as a racehorse. His numbers tell us he was as effective a stallion, (and perhaps a bit more), than any single horse in the history of the South African breed.

We knew Jet Master, or should we say his family, well. His great grandmother lived at Summerhill, a daughter of the Platberg Stud resident, Joy 11, and the only Black Type horse in several generations of her pedigree. We knew his grandmother as well, because she was bred and raised here, and we knew his mother too, for the same reasons. We also knew the family of one of his greatest offspring, the internationally celebrated J.J. The Jet Plane. His mother, too, was bred at Summerhill by our own giant, Northern Guest, and his grandmother, his great grandmother and beyond, were all residents of the old Hartford.

We shall all miss Jet Master, as his passing leaves an enormous hole in the ranks of our stallions. But the one thing South Africa will have gained from his being, is that we no longer need to stand back when it comes to our local bred as stallions. The one thing he’s demonstrated so well, and he’s done so time and again, is that the highly performed racehorse; bred, raised and tested on our home tracks, is as effective a weapon in the production of good horses, as any.

Our thoughts go out to Pat and Henry Devine, to Benny Marais and his team at Klipdrift Stud, and to the nation as a whole.

2010 L'ORMARINS QUEEN'S PLATE VIDEO AND RESULTS

Click above to watch the 2010 L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate
(Footage : SuperSport)

R1MILLION L’ORMARINS QUEEN’S PLATE (GRADE 1) 1600M
KENILWORTH RACECOURSE
9 JANUARY 2010

Pocket Power shattered the history books at Kenilworth on Saturday with an awe inspiring fourth consecutive victory in the 149th L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate. Congratulations to Mike Bass, Candice Robinson and team at Mike Bass Racing; Marsh Shirtliff, Arthur and Rina Webber, Zandvliet Stud and Pat and Henry Devine.

FINAL RESULTS

#	Horse	Kg	MR	Dr	Jockey	Trainer
1	POCKET POWER	58	119	1	B Fayd’Herbe	Mike Bass
2	KAPIL	58	115	3	MJ Byleveld	Stan Elley
3	BIG CITY LIFE	58	111	10	K Teetan	Glen Kotzen
4	FABIANI	58	103	2	R Fourie	Glen Kotzen
5	STRATEGIC NEWS	58	107	8	P Cosgrave	Dylan Cunha
6	IVORY TRAIL	58	111	5	R Danielson	Joey Ramsden
7	THUNDER KEY	58	106	4	S Cormack	Glen Kotzen
8	FOREST PATH	58	107	7	G Schlechter	Stephen Page
9	BLUE TIGER	58	109	9	K Neisius	Mike Bass
10	GAULTIER	58	107	6	G Hatt	Mike Bass

POCKET POWER WINS 3RD J and B MET

Pocket Power : J&B Met Champion 2007 - 2009
(Photos : Gold Circle)

Pocket Power made history today by taking a third successive victory in the R2,5million J&B Met over 2000m at Kenilworth Racecourse.

Jumping from draw 10, the six-year-old gelding by Jet Master raced to perfection. Under the cool-headed skill of jockey Bernard Fayd’Herbe, Pocket Power stalked the fighting filly Dancer’s Daughter before executing his winning move. He powered past the grey in the straight and held on gallantly for an historical victory with full sister River Jetez closing rapidly for third.

Trainer Mike Bass must be congratulated for bringing Pocket Power to undoubtedly his career-best racing form for the big occasion on J&B Met raceday.

This 32nd renewal of the J&B Met has witnessed the crowning of a true South African Thoroughbred Champion.

To Pat and Henry Devine, Marsh Shirtliff, Arthur and Rina Webber, Mike Bass and Candice Robinson as well as their team at Mike Bass Racing, Bernard Fayd’Herbe and of course to the South African dream, Pocket Power, the entire teams of Summerhill and Vuma extend our warmest congratulations.