E & E Not A Throw-Back To Carry Back

It’s held to be true that high class speed is the most reliably transmitted trait in breeding.

More good sprinters will sire winners more reliably (leaving aside the question of class) than will, say, mile-and-a-half racers.

Therefore it’s no great surprise to see Exceed And Excel, a great specimen and a sprinting son of Danehill, bounce away to a good start with his first crop though it’s far too early to determine what the ultimate depth and breadth of his siring performance is going to be.

Scanning through his first four stakeswinners for common themes, I see that three of them are out of good racemares, all daughters of speed sires. Exceedingly Good is out of stakes-placed Common Smytzer (Snippets/Damascus cross); Wilander is out of multiple Group winner Scandinavia (Snippets/Vain cross); Sugar Babe is out of multiple Group winner On Type (Zeditave/Marauding cross). The fourth stakeswinner, Believe’n’Succeed is out of the minor USA winner Arctic Drift (Gone West/Storm Cat cross – the grandam was a dual G1 winner).

(Incidentally, the average price of this quartet as yearlings was $456,250).

Primarily an American product in Australian clothing, Exceed And Excel seems at this early stage to like American strains including more Raise A Native/Native Dancer.

Just as well he didn’t take after nor relies for his prowess on further strains of Carry Back, who is the sire of his third dam Back Britches. Carry Back, whose own sire wore the hugely masculine name Saggy, is described in Richard Ulbrich’s Peerage Of Racehorses as “thin and rather lightly-built, particularly through the quarters, and weighing only 960 lbs (about 430 kgs) and full of conformation faults – as one observer wrote ‘high-headed, narrow, long-backed, herring-gutted and sickle-hocked’.” Said to stand 15.1, Carry Back was out of an unplaced mare while the next four dams were unraced.

Exceed And Excel’s grandam Gladiolus is the second-best product sired by G1 winner Watch Your Step, a low-brow son of the champion but weak sire Citation. (Carry Back and Citation between them had 106 raceday starts, winning exactly 50% of them). Gladiolus produced a good runner in Swamp King who divided stud duties between Canada and Victoria, siring here 273 live foals in six seasons of which only two were stakeswinners.

With the help of Danehill and good mares, Exceed And Excel appears to be rising above the pack.