Quality Road, a rising star in the stallion ranks for Lane’s End Farm over the last several years, will again see his stud fee spike in 2020, with his advertised fee of $200,000 placing him among the most expensive sires in North America.
Quality Road, a multiple Grade 1 winner by Elusive Quality, stood for an advertised fee of $70,000 in 2018 – up from $35,000 the prior year – after a career season in which he was represented by champions Abel Tasman and Caledonia Road.
Lane's End Farm has acquired the breeding rights to Game Winner, last year's Eclipse Award champion juvenile, and plans to add him to its stallion roster in 2021.
Lane's End made the announcement while also releasing its roster and fees for 2020, with one new addition for the upcoming season in Breeders' Cup Sprint candidate Catalina Cruiser. Both recently acquired stallion prospects are by Lane's End stallions, as Game Winner is by Candy Ride and Catalina Cruiser is by Union Rags.
Triple Crown winner American Pharoah rolled home in the 2015 Breeders’ Cup Classic to end his racing career in style. But in some ways, his story was just beginning. Soon thereafter he arrived at Coolmore’s Ashford Stud in Kentucky where he would attempt to replicate himself.
And while American Pharoah was dominant on the racetrack, he faces a strong group of rival freshman sires as he begins to construct his legacy.
Street Sense won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile in 2006 and then went on to become the first winner of that race to take the following year’s Kentucky Derby. This week in the Breeders’ Cup, his son Maxfield will try to put himself on the road to the Juvenile-Derby double, and his McKinzie will try to do something Street Sense couldn’t.
Union Rags was an obvious young stallion prospect for Lane’s End Farm to invest in. Phyllis Wyeth’s homebred is a son of former farm stallion Dixie Union, and going another generation back, his grandsire, Dixieland Band, was one of the original three stallions at Lane’s End Farm when it was established.
The breeding rights to Grade 1 winner Eight Rings, who is among the favorites for next week's Breeders' Cup Juvenile, have been acquired by the international Coolmore group. The outfit plans to stand the colt at its Ashford Stud in Kentucky upon his eventual retirement.
A horse is a horse, of course, of course – even when that horse is a graded stakes winner who is one of the favorites for a Breeders’ Cup race. So Jim and Susan Hill of Margaux Farm make sure that their stable star Totally Boss gets to act like the horse he is between races by coming back to the farm, a training method that has taken him to the threshold of a tilt at the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint on Nov. 2 at Santa Anita.
Triple Crown winner Justify and the globe-trotting Mendelssohn were the busiest stallions in North America in 2019 as they stood their first season at Coolmore’s Ashford Stud in Kentucky, The Jockey Club’s Report of Mares Bred revealed Thursday.
Mongolian Groom punched his ticket to the Breeders’ Cup Classic with his victory in the Grade 1 Awesome Again Stakes in September at Santa Anita, prompting his connections to supplement him to the race. He also punched a ticket home to Kentucky for his sire, Hightail, who has found stakes success from a limited sample size and now returns from several seasons in Arkansas to Calumet Farm for the 2020 season.
