Archipenko Is Doubly Special

Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa al Maktoum – yellow with the blue yoke – has had mixed fortunes since he began making heavy investments in Australian bloodstock about six years ago.

He has spent squillions aiming for the big time here without really hitting the jackpot. Murtajill was a colt with high ability but through bad luck mostly appears to have missed the bus, Perfectly Ready got a soft G1 after he bought into him and he bred but sold Von Costa de Hero as a yearling. It’s now owned by his cuz. There has been the odd success at a reasonable level but they pale into insignificance compared with what he’s spent. A big day in the sun still awaits him.

Overseas, he seems to have fared rather better, sourcing tried horses from all ends of the globe which have subsequently raced well for him at Group level, including Asiatic Boy.

One of the most recent is Archipenko which won the G1 Audemars Piguet Queen Elizabeth II Cup in Hong Kong in April and added the G2 Summer Mile at Ascot in England this morning.

Archipenko who, as a three-year-old ran last in the English Derby, is these days trained by South African Mike de Kock who knows no borders in his pursuit of racing’s big prizes: he has to be one of the universe’s great organizers, this bloke.

Named for a celebrated Ukrainian sculptor of the cubist school, Archipenko is a four-year-old with one of the most exalted pedigrees imaginable – by Kingmambo out of Bound, by Nijinsky out of Special. That’s so exciting it could cause incontinence.

Surely one day Kingmambo is going to leave a superior sire son? It’ll be a tragedy if he doesn’t. He is a great sire and it should be noted that he has achieved that greatness, albeit with the help of many fine mares, but with foals crops which have exceeded 80 in number only once.

I first saw the horse in 1996 when I went to Lexington, Kentucky, with Peter Keating to finalise the shuttling of another G1 winning son of Mr Prospector by the name of Miner’s Mark who was just retiring to Lane’s End.

We took one look at Miner’s Mark and knew he wasn’t the horse for us. He was as big and as ugly as Kingmambo was neat and attractive. Only half-jokingly we suggested Lane’s End might like to consider shuttling Kingmambo, then only in his third season. The answer we got reminded me that even Americans think we are just a bunch of colonials, except when it comes to fighting their wars.

Miner’s Mark turned out to be worse than bad. Later, he had a brother named Traditionally who shuttled to NZ but he has been a rank failure in both hemispheres, though his two-year-old colt Firth Of Fifth scored an upset win in the G2 Superlative Stakes at Newmarket on Friday.

The stallion we ended up shuttling from that trip was the great sprinter Housebuster (by Mt Livermore) who was received with mild enthusiasm in NZ, shuttling twice and leaving just over 100 live foals. The one thing Housebuster forgot to do in NZ was leave his own speed; his best winners liked a middle distance. On bald figures he didn’t do a bad job with nearly 66% winners-to-runners and five stakeswinners, 7.5% of his starters. He is the sire of the dam of this season’s highest earning NZ juvenile, Vincent Mangano but I go on too much, I am only trying to justify the decision!

Back to Archipenko. He is the 11th and final foal of Bound who was 20 when she foaled him. Bound is out of the very special Special from whom descend nearly three dozen of the best-known stakeswinners of recent decades. She is the dam of Number and of Nureyev and the grandam of Sadler’s Wells and Fairy King.

Kingmambo is out of the peerless miler Miesque who is by Nureyev. Nureyev and Bound are three-quarter siblings. Rasmussen Factor to die for (more about Rasmussen some other time). Nine of Bound’s 11 foals were either by Mr Prospector or a variety of his sons and until Archipenko came along none of them was a stakeswinner. Persistence is hard to beat, if you can afford it.