Oppenheim on APEX: 6.8 Percent the New Standard?

In his weekly column, Bill Oppenheim discusses APEX ratings which have been assigned to horses across the age spectrum, and it is no surprise, Oppenheim offers, that the top eight sires (with 200+ foals of racing age) are from the older generation, led by Danzig with 15.3 percent 'A' runners to foals. This is due, in large part, to the advent of the “Big-Book” era, which began in 1996, according to Oppenheim. The dilution in the quality in stallions' books has caused a resultant fall in percentage of A runners and that at some point mares wer increasingly bred which had no chance of collectively producing one percent stakes winners.