Hall of Fame sprinter Xtra Heat dead at 24

Xtra Heat, an Eclipse Award champion and Hall of Fame racemare, died in December, owner Woodford Thoroughbreds confirmed via a press release this week. The Dixieland Heat mare was 24.

Xtra Heat won 26 of 35 career starts, including an astounding 25 stakes races, a modern record for a distaffer. She missed the board only twice while earning $2,389,635 in a career that spanned from 2000 to 2003. She was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2015.

“I have always been proud to have the privilege of owning and being responsible for a Hall of Fame horse,” Woodford owner John Sykes said in a release. “She will be greatly missed on the farm and by the team.”

Xtra Heat was trained throughout her career by John Salzman Sr. He owned her with Kenneth Taylor and Harry Deitchman until they sold her privately to Classic Star Stable toward the end of her career.

Xtra Heat won her first six starts, including five stakes, highlighted by the Grade 2 Astarita at Belmont, before finishing 10th when stretched out in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies.

Starting the following month and running through the first half of her 3-year-old season, Xtra Heat ripped off another six straight stakes wins, a streak that ended when she was beaten a nose in the Grade 2 Nassau County. She then won the Grade 1 Prioress and finished second in the Grade 1 Test. She finished the year with a pair of gallant efforts against older males, finishing second by half-length in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint and third in the Grade 1 Frank J. De Francis Memorial Dash Stakes. Xtra Heat earned the 2001 Eclipse Award as the nation’s outstanding 3-year-old filly; the award for outstanding female sprinter did not yet exist.

In a dozen starts as a 4- and 5-year-old, Xtra Heat added another nine stakes wins, six graded including the Grade 3 Phoenix against males. She was also third in the Group 1 Golden Shaheen against males in Dubai.

Her record by Beyer Speed Figures was remarkable. In her last 19 starts, she recorded 17 triple-digit Beyers; the other two were 99. During a three-race arc late in her 3-year-old season, she recorded figures of 117, 120 (her career high), and 118.

As a broodmare, first for Classic Star and then for Woodford, which purchased the mare through a dispersal in 2006, Xtra Heat produced eight winners from 11 starters. Her offspring included Grade 3-placed stakes winners Southwestern Heat and Elusive Heat, and stakes-placed X Rated Cat. Southwestern Heat, who now stands in Australia, is the sire of nine stakes winners in the U.S. Meanwhile, one of Elusive Heat’s daughters has produced graded stakes winner Scalding and stakes winners Tracksmith and Hot and Sultry. Xtra Heat’s final foal is the unraced 4-year-old Casino Heat.

Xtra Heat lived out her pensioned years at Woodford’s Florida farm.

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