Two-time Horse of the Year California Chrome is the latest accomplished runner to join the Japanese stallion ranks, as he has been purchased to stand at Arrow Stud beginning in 2020.
It would be impossible to top the year the Glennwood Farm of father-daughter team John and Tanya Gunther had in 2018, earning an Eclipse Award after breeding and raising unbeaten Triple Crown winner Justify. But the 2019 Breeders’ Cup proved to be a fine exclamation point to another fine season for the Gunthers. Vino Rosso, whom the family bred, concluded an outstanding season by winning the Breeders’ Cup Classic, and earlier in the day, the farm’s homebred Without Parole finished a creditable third in the Mile.
It didn’t take long for American Pharoah to get off and running as a Breeders’ Cup sire. The Triple Crown winner’s first race with Breeders’ Cup starters resulted in his first winner, as Four Wheel Drive won the Juvenile Turf Sprint. Another colt by American Pharoah, Another Miracle, finished third in the same race, and later in the day Sweet Melania finished third in the Juvenile Fillies Turf, putting all three of the stallion’s starters for the day on the board.
A Breeders’ Cup victory that puts a young horse on the path toward the Kentucky Derby or Kentucky Oaks is virtually priceless. But Storm the Court and British Idiom, who each earned 20 points toward the spring classics with their victories in the Juvenile and Juvenile Fillies, respectively, both were bargain buys, costing just $100,000 combined.
Regally-bred Grade 1 winner Delta Prince, who was scheduled to enter stud next year in Kentucky, was euthanized Friday. The 6-year-old son of Street Cry was undergoing treatment at Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital, but suffered complications associated with laminitis and renal failure subsequent to an incident of colic, owner and breeder Adena Springs said in a press release.
Zenyatta spent three championship campaigns in trainer John Shirreffs’s barn in California. But whatever memories of her former life as a racehorse remain for Zenyatta, now a broodmare at Lane’s End Farm in Kentucky, she evidently doesn’t remember the trainer who guided her to titles as champion older female in 2008, 2009, and 2010, and Horse of the Year in 2010.
Shirreffs said he last saw Zenyatta while attending the Keeneland September sale, and that she didn’t seem to remember him.
“She’s forgotten about me,” he said. “Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.”
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.