Progeny of Gun Runner win five stakes on Saturday

Horse of the Year Gun Runner, who has already established himself as a sensational young sire, recorded an incredible five stakes winners on Saturday – including sweeping the Grade 1 stakes at Parx Racing – to make his current crop of yearlings look like potential bargains.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Steve Asmussen, who trained Gun Runner and who sent out his champion daughter Echo Zulu as part of the winning quintet this weekend. “It’s unbelievably exciting for the entire team.”

Gun Runner, a six-time Grade 1 winner owned by Winchell Thoroughbreds and Three Chimneys Farm, now stands at Three Chimneys in Midway, Ky. Last year, he smashed the earnings record for a North American freshman sire and led the overall 2-year-old sire list. His runners were led by Echo Zulu, who put together an unbeaten juvenile campaign for a divisional Eclipse Award.

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His runners have continued on just as strongly as 3-year-olds, and others from this crop have continued to emerge. That was highlighted on Saturday at Parx by his son Taiba and daughter Society.

Taiba won the Grade 1 Pennsylania Derby, with another son of Gun Runner, Cyberknife, in third. That reversed the result of the Grade 1 Haskell Invitational in July, when Cyberknife bested Taiba for a Gun Runner exacta. Both colts are multiple Grade 1 winners this season, with Cyberknife having won the Arkansas Derby and Taiba the Santa Anita Derby.

Earlier on the card, Society continued her rise with a front-running 5 3/4-length victory in the Grade 1 Cotillion Stakes. The filly has now won five of six outings overall, adding the Cotillion to earlier wins in the Monomoy Girl Stakes and Grade 3 Charles Town Oaks.

Meanwhile, Echo Zulu won the Grade 3 Dogwood Stakes at Churchill in her first outing since incurring her lone defeat, a fourth in the Kentucky Oaks. Echo Zulu led a trio of stakes winners for Gun Runner at Churchill on Saturday night, with Gunite taking the Harrods Creek and Sixtythreecaliber winning the Seneca. Both Echo Zulu and Gunite are trained by Asmussen and race in Winchell colors.

Gun Runner is the runaway leader on the second-crop sire leaderboard, with Preakness Stakes winner Early Voting and Gunite also among his Grade 1 winners. His graded stakes winners include Pappacap and Wicked Halo, and his stakes winners include Concept, Optionality, Red Run, and Shotgun Hottie. He is the sire of six winning 2-year-olds of 2022.

Meanwhile, Gun Runner’s third crop has been warmly received in the yearling auction rings this season. He sired the sale topper at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga selected yearling sale, with a $2.3 million colt sold to Coolmore and White Birch. Led by a pair of seven-figure horses, Gun Runner averaged $704,375 from eight sold at Fasig-Tipton Saratoga.

At the Keeneland September yearling sale, which concluded on Saturday, Gun Runner finished with 40 yearlings sold for gross sales of $18,475,000, ranking sixth among all sires; his average price was $461,875, placing him third. He was represented by five seven-figure yearlings.

“Gun Runner is a sensation,” said Tom Ryan of SF Racing, which purchased a $1.05 million Gun Runner colt in partnership with Starlight Racing and Madaket Stables. “There is no other way to describe him.”

A Gun Runner colt sold for $1.15 million to the partnership of Coolmore, John Oxley, and Breeze Easy demonstrated the rising stock of the stallion. The colt was an extremely successful pinhook after being purchased by Peter O’Callaghan’s Woods Edge Farm for $185,000 as a weanling last November.

“Wonderful temperament, very solid,” O’Callaghan said of the colt. “All these Gun Runners are easy to train. They take the hardships. He looks very sound. Very strong mentally. We’ve never had a stallion like this guy. We’ve had some great sires – Tapit, Into Mischief, Uncle Mo – but Gun Runner is a little bit extra. It’s incredible.”

Gun Runner was a winning 2-year-old, and acquitted himself well in the spring of his 3-year-old year by winning multiple graded stakes and finishing third in the 2016 Kentucky Derby. He won his first Grade 1 in November 2016 and continued to improve, and was nearly untouchable as an older horse to earn 2017 Horse of the Year honors. That bodes well for his offspring continuing to improve.

“We always said this horse has a lot of room for improvement,” Gary Young, bloodstock agent for Taiba’s owner, Amr Zedan, said after Saturday’s win. “We think he will be even better next year – and he is pretty damn good this year.”

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