Quiet American

It's easier to identify the phenomenon of a broodmare sire than to account for it. But we certainly have a modern marvel of the genre in Bernardini, whose posthumous consolidation of what had been an exceptionally precocious emergence in this sphere reached a fresh peak as the Saratoga summer drew to a close. On Saturday, one of his daughters produced Immersive (Nyquist) to win the GI Spinaway Stakes; and on Monday another Bernardini mare gave us Chancer McPatrick (McKinzie) to achieve a reciprocal status among the crop's colts in the...

By this stage, they've probably had enough of being asked about that $1 mare. But the remarkable thing is that the first Thoroughbred ever acquired by Robert and Stacy Mitchell still cost more (cover fees aside) than all the others that have stocked Briland Farm, on and off the racetrack, since 2001. That was the year, having begun an inadvertent breeding career with a mare discarded by a friend of a friend, they decided to see what they could do with one that cost as much as $36,000. Her name...