Grade 3 winner Uncle Vinny has been retired from racing and will enter stud at Stonewall’s Prestige Stallions in Ocala, Fla., for the 2017 breeding season at an advertised fee of $4,000.
The 4-year-old son of Uncle Mo won two of 12 starts for earnings of $224,500, highlighted by a victory in the Grade 3 Sanford Stakes and third-place efforts in the Grade 1 Hopeful Stakes and listed Long Branch Stakes. He was campaigned by Starlight Racing and trained by Todd Pletcher.
Unbridled’s Song has continued to make headlines more than three years after his death, as he has been posthumously represented by champions Will Take Charge and Arrogate. The stallion’s final runners are 3-year-olds this year, and he appears to have another chance at a standout with Battalion Runner, the winner of an allowance/optional claimer last Saturday at Gulfstream.
Among the many great performances in Breeders’ Cup history few, if any, have been more visually impressive or more exciting than Arazi’s mad dash through and around almost the entire field in the 1991 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. The diminutive chestnut with offset knees looked like a cheetah scattering elephants as he zipped through the field before drawing off to win by an eased-down five lengths.
The colt who knocked the Florida road to the Kentucky Derby askew last Saturday is named for Ireland, is by a Kentucky stallion, and has roots in European breeding. But his actual birthplace is a state not known for producing top Thoroughbreds – New Jersey.
Champion sprinter Big Drama will relocate to Stonewall’s Prestige Stallions in Ocala, Fla., for the 2017 breeding season, where he will be offered at an advertised fee of $7,500 for an introductory period.
The 11-year-old son of Montbrook stood the past two seasons at Bridlewood Farm, where he was advertised last year for $15,000. Big Drama returns to the place where he entered stud in 2012, when the property was known as HallMarc Stallions at Stonewall Farm.
Big Drama has three crops of racing age, with 47 winners and progeny earnings in excess of $2.5 million.
The Grade 1-placed New York-bred Tencendur will return to his home state for stallion duty at Mill Creek Farm in Stillwater.
The Warrior’s Reward horse, who raced as a homebred for Philip Birsh, the publisher of Playbill Magazine, will begin his stud career with a $2,500 fee. Stillwater, a town outside of Saratoga Springs, is about 25 miles from Birsh’s farm in Galway, where Tencendur was born and raised.
At the 1989 Keeneland September yearling sale, Rob Whiteley, director of operations for Carl Icahn’s Foxfield, fell in love with a chestnut filly by Meadowlake out of the In Reality mare, Inreality Star. Whiteley purchased the filly in Foxfield’s name for only $90,000, and within a little more than a year, she had won all seven of her starts as a 2-year-old, including a dominating victory in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies to clinch an Eclipse Award as champion 2-year-old filly of 1990.
Love the Chase, the dam of California Chrome, delivered a Tapit half-brother to her two-time Horse of the Year at midnight Thursday at Atlas Farm in Nicholasville, Ky.
Love the Chase has been boarded at Atlas since selling for $1.95 million at last November’s Fasig-Tipton Kentucky fall selected mixed sale, where bloodstock agent John McCormack said he purchased her for undisclosed domestic clients. Since then, Tom Ryan, a representative for S.F. Bloodstock, has shared news about the mare.
Taylor Made Farm hopes California Chrome can end his racing career with a bang in the $12 million Pegasus World Cup before shipping to its farm the next day to begin his stud career. But the Taylor family may have a soft spot in their hearts for two of the two-time Horse of the Year’s challengers as well.
