Ask Beyer: Top-fig horses often makes good stallions

Q. Is there a way to determine what stallions with high Beyer Speed Figures have the greatest ability to transmit that speed to their offspring?

– Eric Schmitz

A. When breeders assess prospective stallions, they look for successful racehorses who possessed good speed – ones who descend from proven stallions and a female family populated by high-quality runners and producers. Racing talent alone won’t make a horse a good sire.

This fact is borne out by the records of horses who have earned the best Beyer Speed Figures since these ratings appeared in Daily Racing Form in 1992. Ghostzapper earned the all-time best figure, 128, and he has had a successful career at stud, ranking among the top 20 U.S. stallions in each of the last three years. But he has certainly not been a superstar as a stallion as he was as a racehorse. And none of the five other horses with figures of a 125 or higher succeeded at stud.

Even though huge figures don’t necessarily translate into huge success at stud, the majority of good stallions proved their racing talent by earning good speed figures. On the list of the top 10 U.S. stallions of 2019, based on earnings of their progeny, six had earned figures in the 116-to-121 range and two others had recorded 111s. (The outlier was North America’s greatest stallion Tapit, whose best career figure was 98. Nobody can explain Tapit.)

I consider a figure of 113 to be a good benchmark for defining elite racing talent. The average winning figure in the Metropolitan Mile and the Whitney Stakes happens to be 113, and if a horse has talent comparable to a Met or Whitney winner, he is probably special. Yet horses with respectable pedigrees who can run 113 or better are sometimes overlooked when they retire. Cross Traffic ran a figure of 116 in the 2013 Westchester Handicap, but he started his breeding career with a modest $15,000 stud fee. In his first crop he sired Jaywalk, the champion 2-year-old filly of 2018.

My favorite success story involving a Beyer Speed Figure was that of Maclean’s Music, who earned the highest figure ever by a first-time starter, 114, but never raced again. Breeder John Sikura took a gamble on the basis of that speed figure,and brought the colt to his Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm to stand for a $6,500 stud fee. Maclean’s Music sired 2017 Preakness winner Cloud Computing and 2018 Champagne Stakes winner Complexity – heartening proof that speed figures can sometimes provide an edge in a difficult, complex game.