Bayern

Overlooked at long odds here and one of two unraced juvenile fillies in the line up, El Bayern became her GI Breeders' Cup Classic-winning sire's first black-type winner in the Muskoka S. on Sunday. Awkwardly away, she looked like she was spinning her wheels while dead last by several lengths for the first few furlongs. Asked for her bid with 2 ½ furlongs left to travel, she looped the field very wide out in the center of the track. Finding more as favored For My Elbi began to run out...

Alittlebitearly (Thunder Gulch--Aquilegia, by Alydar), dam of GI Breeders' Cup Classic winner Bayern (Offlee Wild), died at Helen Alexander's Middlebrook Farm after producing a healthy filly by GI Kentucky Derby winner Nyquist. The 18-year-old mare was bred by Alexander in partnership with her mother, Helen Groves, and sister, Dorothy Matz. Bayern, purchased by Kaleem Shah for $320,000 at the 2013 Fasig-Tipton Midlantic May sale, won the 2014 Classic, as well as that year's GI William Hill Haskell Invitational S., GII Pennsylvania Derby, and GII Woody Stephens S. Alittlebitearly had no...

After surveying the four intakes since, each still safely immune from judgement on the track itself, today we finally reach the first group of stallions who have actually tested their ability to replicate the talent that first earned them--however marginally, in some cases--a place at stud. Their first juveniles, last year, at least permitted some initial response to any erosion of their reputations, through the notoriously jittery and impressionable consensus of the yearling market. Yet there are few more instructive indices of the odds against them than the contrast between...