Wildcat Red

His conversation still retains a charming French inflection, all these years later, but when Xavier Moreau first crossed the water his English was really quite rudimentary. And he remembers going into a men's clothing store in Houston and being baffled by the gigantic measurements on every single garment. An assistant wandered over. "May I help you, sir?" Moreau gesticulated. "I can't find anything my size," he said. As he recalls, the guy "was looking at me like I had come down from the moon." "Well, no, you won't find anything...

This is the second part of the latest instalment in our ongoing series assessing stallion options for the new covering season, now tackling sires who have just sold their first yearlings. The first part, which appeared in Tuesday's edition, can be read here. Dixie Union has achieved quite a legacy as a broodmare sire and, following on from Mohaymen (Tapit), two other stallions in this group are out of his daughters. KLIMT (Quality Road-Inventive by Dixie Union) has maintained an industrial output through his first three books at Darby Dan,...

We've taken a breather in this series during the January Sale, where I shared many conversations on themes raised in its first two parts--notably the market's addiction to unproven stallions. Time after time, it was the same story. A shrug of the shoulders, a helpless spreading of the hands: "Yes, we know it's nuts. But we have to make the game pay." Fair enough. It's a bit like the individual who asks why he or she should make a massively inconvenient personal sacrifice, with regard to the climate crisis, when...