When Less Can Be More

I’m taking a bigger punt than usual in selecting only a moderately fertile stallion for one of my mares this year – Coolmore Stud’s Spinning World (USA).

In my former life I had a bit to do with a couple of sub-fertile stallions and it’s no fun standing them.

Spinning World’s fertility, or lack of it, is no secret. He has averaged 64.5% in eight Australian stud seasons, and he achieved just 57.7% in his lone New Zealand season in 2000. He’s now 15 years old.

Naturally, it’s the blood and the physicals which appeal to me about using Spinning World otherwise I wouldn’t be running the risk, but apart from that where else on this vast sandy continent can you find a stallion which has sired seven individual Group 1 winners standing for a listed $10,000 fee? Only Quest For Fame (GB), as far as I can see, and he’s a lot older (21) and isn’t appropriate for my mare.

Spinning World seems to be a filly sire with 11 of his 16 southern hemisphere-conceived stakeswinners being female, the latest being the good sorts Heavenly Glow and Kishkat. With the exception of Thorn Park, the black-type males have been a notch below the females, so maybe the sex bias is real. It would need a better mathematician than I to figure out how much the numbers are skewed by the fact that a significantly large chunk of stakes races are for fillies and mares only - though thinking out loud, it’s the same for all stallions so maybe I’ve already answered my own question! But Spinning World has an overall 68.3% winners-to-runners figure and 10% of his individual winners are stakeswinners,figures which indicate a good achiever to me. There should be no argument that he delivers more per spermatozoa than many stallions standing at multiples of his fee.

Danewin is another moderately fertile stallion whose figures almost mirror Spinning World’s. He is a very good sire and it is one of the great quirks of history that this horse was one of the cheapest Danehill yearlings ever sold - $20,000. He must have looked like Belsen. Spinning World has been more rigorously used at stud than Danewin, averaging 48.3 live foals per season (seven seasons, 3YOs and older) against Danewin’s substantially lower 38.4 live foals per season (nine seasons). One could quote statistics endlessly, and I’m mindful of the quotation I ran on this blog last week, but last season’s leading sire Encosta de Lago, for example, has had an average of 126.7 live foals per crop in his eight crops 3YO and older. To his great credit, his stats are much on a par with Spinning World’s and Danewin’s but a bit behind Redoute’s Choice who is probably the current benchmark: an average of 116.2 live foals per crop with 70% winners-to-runners and an impressive 15.7% of his winners being stakeswinners.

The two sub-fertile stallions I encountered close up in my working career were Zephyr Bay and Tights (USA). I still regard Zephyr Bay, by Biscay, as possibly the most handsome horse I’ve ever seen and the equal of any sire. He was majestic. There is a magnificent photo of him being ridden in his Waikato Stud paddock, as a stallion, on page 91 of Peter Taylor’s Thoroughbred Studs of Australia and New Zealand (published 1986).

Arion Pedigrees attribute these figures to Zephyr Bay from his 12-season stud career in New Zealand: 147 named foals (that’s an average of just 12.2 per crop for those of you having difficulty working it out), 117 runners, 97 winners (83%), 20 individual stakeswinners of which seven were then classified Group 1. In his later NZ seasons, only the home stud supported him with mares of much quality, the others sent up by his shareholders were more like jersey cows, understandable as they didn't want their prize mares going empty every year. Yet he could still leave a dasher. His transfer to Australia in 1987 (removed from the property with great subterfuge whilst I was holidaying overseas) was an ill-starred act of virtual criminality which ought to make a great movie – the main roles could be played by the real people, they’re still alive). The poor bugger was flogged at stud over here to produce a further 116 live foals in his final five seasons – almost double his New Zealand average seasonal output – but the result was a vindictive, measly two stakeswinners, the best being a Gr 3 and the other in Tasmania. Go figure. He was one Aussie who after tasting the delights of life in NZ didn't want repatriation! A handful of his Australian-bred daughters have subsequently featured in the pedigrees of worthwhile stakeswinners.

Zephyr Bay was a character. He would fall in love with the same mares every year. Grey mares were his Viagra. We even got to placing one in the serving barn while he was doing the business with a girl of another colour. There was a correlation between the vigour of his service and impregnations; his range of problems, some physical, some psychological, often reduced him to a reluctant coverer or one just going through the motions, fakin’ it.

Tights (USA) (Nijinsky-Dancealot, by Round Table), who went to stud with a lot of commercial fanfare, was not as impaired as Zephyr Bay. His output over 9 seasons was 318 named foals with fertility averaging around 60%. His winners-to-runners rate was a more mortal 63% but a strong 12% of his winners were stakeswinners and, extraordinarily, 14 of the 18 stakeswinners were fillies.

Are sub-fertile stallions outputters of higher quality? A question for our age. Bel Esprit covered 266 mares last year alone. Zephyr Bay would have had cardiac arrest and definitely phallic failure!

Though he didn’t suffer from any form of infertility that I know of, Pakistan II (GB) who died in his prime, is, for mine, the greatest local sire in my lifetime. This non-stakeswinner achieved 81% winners-to-starters (264/326) with 16.2% of his winners being stakeswinners. I know you think I've lost my marbles as I’ve lived through Star Kingdom, Sir Tristram, Danehill, Zabeel, Redoute’s Choice et al, but none of them except perhaps Sir Tristram had such a humble background and none was stood by a family of potato farmers.

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It's been announced Miss Andretti is to visit Exceed And Excel in her maiden year. That is something to conjure. What a wonderful sprinter she was and what far-sightedness on Sean Buckley's part to identify her ultimate greatness while she was running a million miles away in Perth. The lasting image I will have of Miss Andretti is the way she always attacked the line, ears back, teeth gritted, giving her all. You could see in her face she knew exactly what she was meant to do. From a pedigree page full of white space, she made a bigger transformation than Eliza Doolittle.

P.S. Former trainer Dave Mueller is a 25% partner in Miss Andretti. I wonder what he's going to do now the mare is retired. Will he stay in as a partner? Will he want to cash up and want Sean to buy him out? Will Sean be happy to do that and how will a value be arrived at? Will Dave sell his leg to someone new if they can't agree on a value? Will the mare go to auction perhaps to see if Sheikh Moh and Patinack have any money left?

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I wonder if there's any basis to the story I've heard that Dreamscape only started in the Up And Coming Stakes after he'd been missed from the acceptances for the maiden at Wyong two days previously? If that's true then either no one realised how good he was or, alternately, he's only just a good maiden winner and the other three-year-olds so far aren't much better!