Study of Man

We're not quite halfway through the Flat season but Royal Ascot feels like a pivotal point. It's not just the fact that it coincides with the summer solstice (even though summer has really only just arrived in these parts) but it includes the first properly meaningful two-year-old contests along with a set of races for the Classic generation which start to underline the really serious prospects. While the yearling sales may tell one story of the popularity of stallions, one only needs to peruse the stakes race results on a...

If you are a racing tragic, and I'd like to think that most TDN readers fall into this celebrated bracket, it is impossible to have a day off at the moment. Trials, Classics, they come thick and fast in these heady weeks of spring. We've waited winterlong, starved of any meaningful action, and now it's hard not to feel a little queasy at the veritable feast of racing which is set before us, course after course after course. There's barely even room for the Cartmel Sticky Toffee Pudding Maiden Hurdle. ...

Sunday at Longchamp was a day for firsts. A Classic victory for Rouhiya (Fr) (Lope De Vega {Ire}) in the Poule d'Essai des Pouliches was an important milestone in the partnership between trainer Francis Graffard and the Aga Khan's powerful racing and breeding operation. Then came a first Classic in his adopted home country for 34-year-old Mario Barrati when Metropolitan (Fr) (Zarak {Fr}) landed the Poulains, a year after the Italian trainer had won the German 2,000 Guineas with Angers (Fr) (Seabhac). But perhaps most notable of all, especially as...

Since the turn of this century we have been blessed to see some special fillies and mares win the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Zarkava (Fr) was followed by Danedream (Ger), Solemia (Ire), Found (Ire), Treve (Fr) and Enable (GB), with the last two named each winning the great race twice. The latest to add her name to that roll of honour was Kirsten Rausing's homebred Alpinista (GB), in 2022. This season the daughter of Frankel (GB) has become a mother for the first time after foaling a filly by...

A person whose job it is to promote horse racing was, rather disappointingly, being sniffy about the Craven meeting on social media last week. I understand that some people don't like racing at the Rowley Mile and, yes, last Tuesday in particular was a little challenging on the weather front. But if you're a Flat racing person, and particularly one who is being paid to tell other people that they should come racing, then you really should appreciate all that is wonderful about these weeks of Classic trials across Europe....

Stick or twist? That's the question faced by many breeders this year. Anecdotally, it appears that some will be pulling back and not covering certain mares, which is understandable after a tricky sales season, not to mention the constant reminders from racecourse managers regarding the "significant headwinds" faced by racing. Unlike America, the foal crop in Britain and Ireland has been gently on the rise in recent years, up to 13,438 in 2023, compared to 12,778 in 2020, though within that combined number for last year, the Irish crop rose...

NEWMARKET, UK -- There are no hotel rooms left in Newmarket. Visitors to Tattersalls are not only spread far and wide across Suffolk and Cambridgeshire but have come from far and wide too. The largest ever contingent from Japan is expected at Park Paddocks this week, and with most of the stallion farms in the region displaying signs saying 'open house' it's the perfect time for international breeders also to consider using a local stallion to cover a new purchase before export. The locals are pretty good after all. Frankel...

One of the reasons that the Racing League has struggled to catch on is that the organisers have underestimated the attachment that regular racegoers and viewers have to certain sets of silks. We all have our favourites, often depending on when we were born and who the leading lights were at the time.  Some have now faded from everyday use, and for this fan the Ballymacoll Stud colours are much missed. Certain silks have such resonance that one almost doesn't need to have a race card handy to have an...

Study Of Man (Ire) is making a growing impression with his first crop of runners, not least through his son Deepone (Ire), winner of the G2 Beresford S. for Vimal Khosla and Paddy Twomey. His latest winner, however, is perhaps the most special to Kirsten Rausing, the owner of Lanwades Stud where the son of Deep Impact (Jpn) stands. On Saturday at Newmarket, the newcomer Sons And Lovers (GB) got up on the line to win the seven-furlong juvenile maiden. Rausing, who bred the colt from the Smart Strike mare...

Most normal people spend some of August at the beach. Bloodstock folk do too, though the spade work involves no bucket, just plenty of prowling around the Arqana sales ground looking at yearlings. There may be the odd oyster here and there at the hospitality suites of various consignors but, make no mistake, this is gruelling work. It's curtain up this Friday for the European yearling sales season, and we all know what that means: Christmas is right around the corner. For breeders and stallion masters, results on the track...

It's early-February and already the Flat enthusiasts are getting excited about what stallion will end the season as champion first-season sire. A futile exercise, one would have thought? Not a bit of it. Even the greatest handlers of young stock, Malcolm Bastard, Alan McCabe, Joseph O'Brien, Conor Hoban and Dick Brabazon, men who know better than most the folly that comes with predicting 2-year-old talent, are keen to have their say on which up-and-coming stallion can make the biggest splash this season.  O'Brien is sticking loyal to Ten Sovereigns (Ire)...

As we move into the third tier of our examination of stallions by yearling profitability, the name at the top of the list for those standing between the equivalent of £10,000 and £19,999 perhaps provides an example of how rarity drives demand. On paper, the Dalham Hall Stud-based Farhh (GB) has an awful lot going for him. A son of Pivotal (GB) out of a dual Group 1 winner over a mile and a half, he was lightly raced, with just one winning appearance in each of his two- and...