Classic winner and freshman sire Union Rags got his first winner from his first starter on Wednesday, as the heavily favored Lady Stardust romped in the first 2-year-old maiden special weight of the year at Aqueduct.
The filly, who is out of the stakes-winning Gilded Time mare Hallelujah Trail, won by 5 1/2 lengths for trainer Wesley Ward, finishing the 4 1/2 furlongs in 52.08 seconds.
Brody’s Cause
Giant’s Causeway – Sweet Breanna, by Sahm
($350,000 purchase by Albaugh Family Stables at 2014 Keeneland September yearling sale)
Trainer Dale Romans calls Blue Grass Stakes winner Brody’s Cause a “prototype” Kentucky Derby horse – and the Giant’s Causeway colt certainly has the class in his pedigree to back it up.
Freshman sire To Honor and Serve, a son of Bernardini, got his first winner from his first starter when the juvenile gelding French General won a trial race at Turf Paradise on Apr. 19. The 4 1/2-furlong race was for juveniles which are eligible for the ATBA Spring Sales Stakes, meaning horses that passed through the sales ring for the Arizona Thoroughbred Breeders Association sale as yearlings last November. The $10,000 trial was essentially a maiden race, as all six starters were making their career debut. The $35,000 ATBA Spring Sales Stakes will be held May 8.
Like mother, like daughter. Newly crowned Canadian Horse of the Year Catch a Glimpse won the Grade 3 Appalachian Stakes last week at Keeneland – a race her mother, Halo River, established the stakes record for in 1998.
Halo River, by Irish River, won the Gold Digger Stakes at Hawthorne in addition to the Appalachian, where she ran the mile in 1:34.80.
As a broodmare, Halo River has produced eight winners from 12 starters, led by Catch a Glimpse and Grade 3 winner Old Forester, now a leading sire in Canada.
As Miss Temple City was being led back onto the Keeneland turf course for her photo after an impressive win in the Grade 1 Maker’s 46 Mile, Mark Toothaker of Spendthrift Farm said that he’d sold her dam, the stakes-placed Artax mare Glittering Tax, for “a quesadilla and a cold beer.”
Throughout the decade that turned the corner into the 21st century, sons of Storm Cat were all the rage among international stallion masters, with scores of his well-bred sons given a chance at stud in addition to the usual Grade 1 winners and champions. The results were understandably mixed. The only real superstar that emerged was three-time leading North American sire Giant’s Causeway, but the title of Storm Cat’s second-best sire son is very much a matter of opinion.
Edited Press Release
Warriors on Horseback, written by John Carter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing, was named the winner of the tenth annual Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award on April 13. The announcement was made at an evening reception at the Ryan family’s Castleton Lyons in Lexington, Ky.
In a year when books about jockeys were a dominant voice in horse racing publishing, Carter’s well-researched work stood out and took home the $10,000 firsts-place prize.
Zenyatta’s newborn War Front colt died Wednesday morning at Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital near Lexington, Ky., continuing a run of bad luck for the champion as a broodmare.
The colt was born Sunday night at Lane’s End Farm, where the 2010 Horse of the Year and Hall of Fame finalist has been boarded since her retirement for owners Jerry and Ann Moss. While the birth was uncomplicated, the colt was born meconium-stained, leading the attending veterinarian to send the mare and foal to a clinic for observation.
