Daily Racing Form's annual special edition takes an in-depth look at North America's leading sires, based in Kentucky, the Thoroughbred capital of the nation. In addition to traditional earnings lists, this edition also features charts for Daily Racing Form's exclusive stallion metrics, the Beyer Sire Performance Standings.
When it came to siring elite-level runners in 2017, nobody did it quite to the level of Claiborne Farm’s War Front, and it appears his run in the upper echelon has only begun. War Front led all sires in 2017 by all-surface Beyer Speed Figures of 90 or more earned by his runners (88), and he tied for the most runners to achieve at least one Beyer of 100 or more (seven).
Medaglia d’Oro led all stallions in North America with seven individual Grade 1 winners in 2017, including a pair of Breeders’ Cup winners, with five of those becoming Eclipse Award finalists. He joins Danzig, Mr. Prospector, and Storm Cat as the only American stallions to sire a septet of top-level winners in a calendar year.
After breaking the single-season earnings record for a North American stallion for three consecutive years, from 2014-16, Tapit was dethroned from atop the general sires earnings list in 2017. However, the Gainesway resident – whose seasonal record of $19,245,198 remains the standard – still made more history.
In case the first four times he did it didn’t prove that Kitten’s Joy is a transcendent sire of turf runners, the new resident of Hill ‘n’ Dale Farms went ahead and led North America’s stallion ranks by grass earnings for a fifth straight year in 2017.
The difference in earnings between Overanalyze, the leading freshman sire of 2017, and runner-up Violence was $76,122, roughly the winner’s share of a maiden special weight purse at Kentucky Downs. The two young stallions’ statistics were in near lockstep by the fall racing season.
Distorted Humor has been on an upward trajectory as a broodmare sire in recent years, and he took over the category in 2017.
Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm resident Curlin compiled one of the great résumés by a racehorse, and his flair for winning big races has carried to his time at stud.
Cherokee Rap, who was Illinois's leading freshman sire and juvenile sire in 2010, died in 2012 at the young age of 11, dealing a major loss to William Stiritz's Wildwood Farms. But the Bellevue operation has carried on.
There are good years for stallion operations, and then there are the “three of the state's top four sires” kind of good years. Swifty Farms in Seymour, Ind., had the latter.
