Mugatu can add to Blofeld's Maryland success
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Mugatu was foaled in Kentucky and trains at Belterra Park in Ohio. But in some ways, he’ll be coming home when he runs in the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course. The colt was conceived in Maryland, as he is sired by Blofeld, a prominent young sire in the state who stands at Murmur Farm in Darlington.
Blofeld is by Quality Road, sire of last year’s Preakness Stakes winner National Treasure, and out of stakes winner Storm Minstrel. The next two dams are graded stakes winner Colonial Minstrel and Group 1 winner Minstrella, from a family the late Edward P. Evans cultivated in Virginia. Blofeld, racing for Glencrest Farm and JSM Equine, won all three starts as a juvenile, including the Grade 2 Futurity and Grade 2 Nashua Stakes; he was stakes-placed in an abbreviated 3-year-old campaign. As an older horse, Blofeld won the Grade 2 Gulfstream Park Handicap.
Blofeld retired for the 2018 season to Murmur Farm.
“I was looking for a stallion and I had followed him a little bit when he was racing,” owner Audrey Murray told the Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred in 2022. “Then he won that big race at 4, and I felt like I was never going to get him. We made an offer and they took it, and then the Quality Roads started hitting big time.”
Blofeld finished among Maryland’s top five freshman sires in 2021, then was second to Divining Rod on the second- and third-crop sire lists the next two years. In 2022, he appeared among the state’s top 10 overall sires, and last year, he climbed into the top five on that list.
Blofeld is the sire of Chickieness, Johnyz From Albany, and Miss Harriett, all stakes winners on the Maryland Million program; plus stakes winners Alpine Mist, Beach Daze, and Charming Way. Miss Harriett is entered in the Grade 3 Miss Preakness Stakes at Pimlico on the eve of Mugatu’s run in the Preakness.
Mugatu, bred by JSM Equine in Kentucky, was a bargain $14,000 purchase by bloodstock agent Dan Preiss out of the Ocala Breeders’ Sales Co.’s spring sale of 2-year-olds, for Christopher Britton’s Average Joe Racing Stables and Dan Wells. Britton and Mugatu’s trainer, Jeff Engler, have been longtime friends since playing sports together in their hometown of Westchester, Ohio. Mugatu, who was a rallying fifth in the Grade 1 Blue Grass, did not draw in to the Kentucky Derby as an also-eligible.
“I think he’s a better horse on dirt,” Engler said. “I brought him to Belterra Park to train him on dirt specifically for that reason, and he’s just thriving on it.”
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