stallions

A native of a small farming community in South Africa, Lere Visagie grew up a long way from the U.S. Thoroughbred industry. Today, he sits at the helm of one of New York State's leading stud farms, as the owner/operator of Rockridge Stud in Hudson, New York, which was established just seven years ago. While his is still a relatively new farm, Visagie said his goal is to improve the stallion market in New York through the growth of Rockridge's stallion division. This year, Rockridge welcomes two new Grade I...

In the second installment of TDN Europe's Value Sires Series, we take a look at the sire crop with its first foals due this season. While the first real clues will be laid out once the foals actually hit the ground, many of this intake had in-foal mares go through the ring at the latest round of breeding stock sales, thus providing a minimal amount of data to tear apart. Numbers of mares bred are taken from the Weatherbys Return of Mares published in November 2019. The covering sire returns...

On New Year's Day, David Grening broke the news in the Daily Racing Form that Coolmore had purchased a 50% interest in the racing and breeding rights of Gary and Mary West's homebred Maximum Security (New Year's Day). (Disclosure: The Wests and their racing manager, Ben Glass, are retained clients of WTC, Inc.). The colt is to stand at Coolmore America (Ashford Stud) in Kentucky at the end of his career, but he is scheduled to race this year and has some major targets on his slate, including the new...

Over the coming days and weeks, we will be touched by the customary pictures of first foals tottering onto the gawky limbs that must someday propel them around the racetrack, and so determine the viability of their sires' new careers. That's the idea, at any rate. Sadly, we know that the auctioneer's gavel will expel some of these stallions from Kentucky--and just to reiterate, we will be surveying regional sires at the end of this series--before their stock gets any meaningful opportunity to test the heritability of the talent that...