Chris McGrath

Breeding Digest: The Real Dazzle Behind Encino

His contentious prohibition from Churchill penalizes many others besides Bob Baffert and his loyal patrons. A shot at the GI Kentucky Derby, once-in-a-lifetime for most, is also being denied to everyone else with a stake in his horses' development, from those on duty at the foaling shed to the pre-trainer to the feed company. And, of course, there's nothing like a Derby winner to market a stallion. As things have turned out, a setback means that Nyquist would have lost the services of Nysos even had he moved to another...

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Value Sires For 2024 Part 6: Reaching The Snowline

Now we're really entering nosebleed altitudes for most breeders, between $30,000 and $50,000: a zone where you should feel that you're improving the odds of coming up with an elite horse. It tells you a lot about our business that the majority of the two dozen stallions operating at this level can only do so because they have yet to send a single runner into the starting gate. A quarter of these we immediately set to one side, as absolute beginners, because those received separate consideration in the opening instalment...

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Value Sires For 2024, Part 4: Into The Teens

Today we'll consider some of the sires standing between $10,001 and $19,999. For a long time, I called this the Lookin At Lucky zone. But don't worry, we won't be deploring his neglect yet again: he's staying in Chile, where they evidently appreciate him rather more. Plenty of horses in this bracket have recently relinquished their brief window of commercial opportunity, and are now hanging around to discover whether they might join the very small group whose first runners generate a fresh vogue. Even with the newcomers out of the...

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Value Sires For 2024, Part 3: The $10k Club

Somehow this is a real sweet spot in the market. For a stallion farm, the $10,000 cover is a particular pitch: you're a cent away from offering a horse at four figures, but you feel that dropping him into a low-rent neighborhood might be beneath his dignity. You're offering a very accessible fee, but you're not going to let him look cheap. That makes this a surprisingly congested zone, ample for separate assessment. And since clinging to a five-figure fee somewhat represents a show of faith, some of these sires...

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Kentucky Value Sires for 2024, Part I: New Stallions

And so another cycle opens, bringing all the usual dilemmas. To assist their resolution--albeit the exercise seldom fails to entail a degree of provocation, sometimes even offense--today we commence our annual quest for value among Kentucky stallions. This time round, value feels likely to prove quite elusive. With the middle market increasingly porous, stud fees overall are at a challenging level. If they were driven up by a long bull run in international bloodstock, that appears to be tapering away and there's evidently going to be quite a lag before...

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First-Crop Value Sires: The Breeders Speak

After hearing from Chris McGrath in his 2024 Value Sires Part I, we thought we'd ask several breeders who they thought offered particularly good value this year. Here's what they said: Jody Huckabay The horses I have chosen are expensive, but I think they are good value. GOLD: Elite Power (Curlin--Broadway's Alibi, by Vindication), Juddmonte Farms, $50,000. The first horse I like for his body of work, race record, and pedigree is Elite Power. To me, he's on top of the list, with everything being considered. I look at it...

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Liberal Arts A Ferraro Family Adventure

His father had long since ceased training, but they still always stood at the same point by the Santa Anita paddock. "There was a spot there, where the horses come out from the saddling enclosure and make a right," Evan Ferraro recalls. "From there you could look at them straight on, so you could see their conformation, their joints, and my dad would point stuff out to me." And there was one filly by In Excess (Ire) that just blew the veteran horseman away: a Harris Farms homebred, saddled by...

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Stud Fees Central To Correcting November Polarization

So we're hearing it at last: the dreaded "C" word. Correction. After a bull run as long as the one we've seen in international bloodstock, we're now hearing this and other words chosen to discourage undue alarm. Last week, on the conclusion of their November Sale, Keeneland officials resorted to adjectives as queasy as "pragmatic" and "solid" to describe trade. "Correction" has a bolder implication: that if the market's down, then so it jolly well should be; values had reached an unsustainable high, and have merely been rocked back onto...

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Big Picture Shows Yearling Market Holding Firm

If a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, does it still make a sound? We'll leave their old teaser to the philosophers, to debate whether noise still qualifies as "sound" if it doesn't reach anyone's ear. But for a long time now our own industry has been puzzling over a still more perplexing version: if a tree falls in the forest, or indeed if a war breaks out in Europe, or a pandemic sweeps the planet, or central banks have to douse the fires...

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Bonne Chance Team Making Their Own Luck

Playing chess with nature. That's what Jean-Luc Lagardère called it, and the analogy has always resonated with Alberto Figueiredo. How, for instance, do we account for the sheer size of King Of Steel (Wootton Bassett {GB}), who sealed his place among the elite sophomores of Europe with his Group 1 success at Ascot last Saturday? You don't particularly see that bulk in the sire; and, tragically, it wasn't in the dam either. In her case, the disparity proved fatal. "She was a good, medium-sized mare but he was so big...

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Keeneland Breeder Spotlight: Rigney Savoring Sweet Flavor of Success

Richard Rigney says that nothing in life gives him a bigger kick than his horses. To understand just what that means, it might help to know his idea of a vacation. A few years ago, for instance, he went on a shooting range in Russia. Not that startling, perhaps: this was obviously before the war in Ukraine. It's just the caliber of the ordnance that was a little unusual. "Shooting a bazooka is so fun," Rigney says. "My wife Tammy was like, 'You know what? I think it's okay that...

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Keeneland Breeder Spotlight: How Greg Goodman, A Good Texan, Became a Brilliant Kentuckian

They call it "nominative determinism." Your name suggests your path in life: like the world's fastest man being a Bolt. On that basis, you would say that being born a Goodman raises expectation enough--without then going ahead and buying yourself a farm named Mt. Brilliant. The last year or so, however, suggests that things are playing out much as they should. Last September, TOBA presented Greg Goodman with the Robert N. Clay Award for his work in preserving horse country around Lexington from development. In April, the KTA/KTOB honored him...

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