Champion Straight No Chaser leads WinStar's sprint trio

There are multiple 2023 and 2024 Eclipse Award champions retiring to stud for the coming season in Kentucky. Along with a trio at Ashford Stud, Straight No Chaser is joining the 2026 stallion ranks.

Straight No Chaser, the 2024 Eclipse champion male sprinter who earned more than $2.6 million, is by Speightster, a WinStar homebred who is a son of the operation’s perennial leading sire Speightstown, also a champion sprinter.

A debut winner at 3 and a Grade 3 winner at 4, Straight No Chaser hit his best stride in the fall of his 5-year-old season. After wins in the Grade 2 Santa Anita Sprint Championship and the Breeders’ Cup Sprint to clinch his title, he campaigned internationally in the winter, winning the Group 2 Riyadh Dirt Sprint.

“Straight No Chaser has a profile very similar to his grandsire Speightstown,” WinStar executive Elliott Walden noted in a release. “He was a Breeders’ Cup winner in the sprint division and a champion who retired at age 6. Straight No Chaser is an exceptionally good-looking horse, and he has demonstrated incredible speed.”

WinStar adds two other Grade 1-winning sprinters to its 2026 roster in Mullikin and Patch Adams. The latter is by sire of sires Into Mischief.