Lessons Learned This Weekend

Prized Icon – An Admirable Australian Ambassador

It has been evident for many years that, while Australian breeders collectively churn out world-class sprinters by the dozen, the country has been gravely under-performing in the production of good stayers. The fact that so many Australian dollars were spent as guineas at Tattersalls in the UK last week at the Horses-In-Training Sale tells that story clearly. As, indeed, does the overwhelmingly NH-focused line-up for this year's G1 Emirates Melbourne Cup. However, the field for last Saturday's G1 Victoria Derby offers some degree of encouragement.
Until the European horses started arriving in large numbers, the only rivals of Australian breeders were their Kiwi counterparts, who traditionally have excelled in the production of stayers. While both sets of breeders are currently marginalised in the middle and long-distance races for older horses, Australia's 3-year-olds' programme provides a good option to assess the state of play within Australasian breeding. The Victoria Derby is arguably the most critical test of high-class stamina of all the Derby-equivalents in Australasia as it is the only one still run in its original slot in the spring. This year's race provided a degree of Australian encouragement as only one of the 16 runners was bred on the other side of the Tasman. Admittedly, the one Kiwi was the favourite, Sacred Elixir (NZ) (Pour Moi {Ire}). However, he didn't win, the prize going to the admirable Prized Icon (Aus) (More Than Ready) who is clearly both a high-class colt (already a Group 1 winner at both two and three) and a strong stayer. One could, of course, argue that this rough-and-ready suggestion of an Australian resurgence in the breeding of stayers tells us more about the decline in the art in New Zealand than about its mastery in Australia, with the focus for many Kiwi breeders having seemingly shifted towards providing sprinter/milers for the south-east Asian market. And one could also point out that the stallion best represented among the Australian team in the Victoria Derby was the 2002 Derby winner High Chaparral (Ire) (Sadler's Wells) – and he is now dead. That, though, would be unnecessarily negative. We can instead just concentrate on the reminder which Prized Icon's Victoria Derby triumph has provided, that Australian breeders can and still do produce some nice stayers.

High Chaparral's Influence Survives

Another heartening result on Victoria Derby Day was the success of Tiamo Grace (Aus) (Monaco Consul {NZ}) in the traditionally excellent Victoria Oaks lead-up race, the G2 Wakeful S. over 2000m. As mentioned above, High Chaparral worked wonders by injecting some much-needed doses of high-class stamina during his years of shuttling to the antipodes, which he spent initially at Windsor Park Stud in New Zealand and subsequently (once he had done so well) at Coolmore in Australia. Tragically, this came to an end when he died in 2014, aged only 15. Monaco Consul was of several high-class stayers in High Chaparral's first NZ crop. This batch also contained 10-time Group 1 winner So You Think (NZ), G1 Australian Derby winner Shoot Out (NZ) and G1 Caulfield Cup winner Descarado (NZ). Trained by Mike Moroney, Monaco Consul fitted nicely into this little galaxy of stars, taking the G1 Spring Champion S. over 2000m and G1 Victoria Derby over 2500m in the spring of 2009. It was heartening for Australia that at the end of his racing career Monaco Consul remained in Australia, where he currently stands at Kingstar Farm near Denman in New South Wales's Hunter Valley.

Coincidentally, the Kingstar roster received a further boost on the same card as another of its three stallions, Salade (Aus) (Snitzel {Aus}) comes from the immediate family of Prized Icon. There are some very good young staying horses at stud currently in both Australia and New Zealand including Melbourne Cup winners. With a Wakeful S. heroine already to his credit, Monaco Consul is clearly another high-class staying stallion who has the potential to do plenty to reinvigorate the higher tiers of the locally-bred staying ranks.

Family Triumphs

The victory of Prize Icon rightly brought into focus the incredible sequence of success of the Cummings family, the colt's trainer James Cummings being the fourth generation to prepare the winner of the great race. His great-grandfather Jim did so in 1948 with subsequent Melbourne Cup winner Comic Court (Aus) (Powerscourt {Aus}) before handing the baton over to his legendary son Bart, responsible for five VRC Derby heroes. Next in line came James's father Anthony, successful four years ago with Fiveandahalfstar (Aus) (Hotel Grand {Aus}). And now James has completed a remarkable quadrella. A less heralded family achievement on Victoria Derby Day, though, was posted by the descendants of Grand Luxe (Sir Ivor). This, of course, is the great family of the Canadian champion of the '60s Ciboulette (Can) (Chop Chop {Can}) and her outstanding daughter Fanfreluche (Can) (Northern Dancer {Can}), a family which has yielded umpteen top racehorses, stallions and mares throughout the world over the last several decades.

This particular branch of it, though, has been particularly kind to Australian racing, most notably with Grand Luxe responsible for Rolls (Mr Prospector) who headed south for her breeding career, during which she produced the champion racehorse and champion stallion Flying Spur (Aus) (Danehill). Two closely-related members of this branch of the family both landed big races on VRC Derby Day, each a grandchild of Grand Luxe's French grand-daughter Spenderella (Fr) (Common Grounds {GB}), a winner at Saint-Cloud who started her stud career in the USA before returning to her homeland. Spenderella's 15-year-old US-bred daughter Star Band (Dixieland Band) hit the jackpot at Flemington when her daughter I Am A Star (NZ) (I Am Invincible {Aus}) landed the G1 Myer Classic; while her 11-year-old French-bred daughter Sicille (Fr) (Anabaa) is responsible for the aforementioned Wakeful S. heroine Tiamo Grace (Aus) (Monaco Consul {NZ}). Both fillies were relatively inexpensive yearlings in 2015. I Am A Star was bought by James Harron out of Inglis' Classic Yearling Sale Summer Book for A$40,000, while Tiamo Grace was picked up by her trainer Darren Weir, working with John Foote, for A$50,000 at Inglis' Premier Yearling Sale in Melbourne.

The Old Ways Work

Just as we keep seeing that the good families keep producing good horses, so did VRC Derby Day remind us that the old methods keep working. The preparations of Melbourne Cup winners have changed hugely in the 23 years since Vintage Crop (GB) (Rousillon) broke the mould by winning for European trainer Dermot Weld in 1993. Up until then, it used to be considered axiomatic that a horse needed to have had plenty of recent racing to score in a big Australian staying race. Bart Cummings was a legendary proponent of this belief, and his Cup winners almost invariably ran on Derby Day, three days before their principal assignment. In fact, his 1990 winner Kingston Rule (Secretariat) ran on both the two Saturdays leading into the Cup. It is interesting to reflect that the VRC waited until Bart had died before moving the Mackinnon S., his preferred Cup lead-up race, away from Derby Day, a move which would surely have provoked strong protest from the master-trainer. Now, with the high-class international horses taking the Cup so often, the winners tend not to have had much recent racing, both because that it is the European way and because the complications of quarantine make it impossible anyway. Prized Icon, though, is a hero in the proper Cummings tradition. He raced seven times as a 2-year-old, breaking his maiden in black-type company at the sixth attempt before taking the G1 Champagne S. on his final outing of the season. This spring he tackled the Victoria Derby (in which he recorded his first win of the season) on his sixth run of the campaign and his third run of the month. Bart would be looking down on his grandson and beaming with pride