Justify continues global rise with juvenile Breeders' Cup wins

Triple Crown winner Justify, who has made a meteoric rise in the international sire ranks, scored a double with his juveniles on the Future Stars Friday program at the Breeders’ Cup. Just F Y I won the Juvenile Fillies to likely secure a divisional championship, followed, less than an hour later, by Hard to Justify’s win in the Juvenile Fillies Turf.

The double encapsulated the versatility of Justify, who is following the lead of his late sire, Scat Daddy, who had top-level performers on both dirt and turf. That versatility has served Justify well on multiple continents for the international Coolmore group.

In addition to his Breeders’ Cup winners, the young stallion is the sire this year of Grade 1 winner Arabian Lion on U.S. dirt, Aspen Grove on the U.S. turf, and City of Troy and Opera Singer on the turf in Europe. He is also the sire of multiple group stakes performers in Australia.

Coolmore guides the careers of both modern American Triple Crown winners at its Ashford Stud in Kentucky, as Justify, who swept the Triple Crown in 2018, stands alongside American Pharoah, who ended a 37-year drought with his run in 2015.

Just F Y I had to hold off American Pharoah’s daughter Jody’s Pride by a neck for her Breeders’ Cup triumph. American Pharoah – who had a Breeders’ Cup winner in 2019 with Four Wheel Drive in the Juvenile Turf Sprint – recorded his own top-level accomplishment on the weekend, as Riff Rocket captured the Group 1 Victoria Derby in Australia.

Riff Rocket was American Pharoah’s eighth Grade/Group 1 winner on his fourth continent, and joins top-level U.S. winners American Theorem, As Time Goes By, Harvey’s Lil Goil, and Marketsegmentation; Europeans Above the Curve and Van Gogh; and Japan’s Cafe Pharoah.

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