Darley sire Street Cry, a $5 million earner on the racetrack and the sire of Zenyatta and Street Sense, was euthanized due to complications from a neurological condition, according to a Wednesday release from the farm. He was 16.
Street Cry was taken out of stud duty early this month while standing the Southern Hemisphere season at Darley’s Kelvinside operation in Australia due to the neurological condition, which caused lameness. The condition had surfaced within the last month.
Grade 2 winner Flashback has been retired from racing and will make his stallion debut in 2015 at Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm in Lexington, Ky.
The 4-year-old son of Tapit finishes his career with two wins in seven starts for earnings of $405,730. His showcase victory came in the Grade 2 Robert B. Lewis Stakes, with placings in the Grade 1 Santa Anita Derby and the Grade 2 San Felipe Stakes that spring. In his final outing, he finished third in the Grade 3 Ack Ack Handicap earlier this month.
Multiple Grade 1 winner Behrens died Sunday following a brief illness at Old Friends at Cabin Creek, the Bobby Frankel division in Greenfield Center, N.Y. A son of Pleasant Colony, Behrens was 20.
"It won't be the same without Behrens," Cabin Creek owner and manager JoAnn Pepper said. "I'm glad to have known him."
The well-traveled Behrens won 9 of 27 career starts, winning three Grade 1 events and placing in nine others, and bankrolled $4,565,500 for owners William Clifton Jr., and Rudelein Stable and trainer James Bond.
Grade 3 winner Super Ninety Nine has been retired from racing and will make his debut at stud in 2015 at the Pons family’s Country Life Farm in Bel Air, Md.
The 4-year-old son of Pulpit will stand as the property of Spendthrift Farm and Country Life Farm. He will be offered in Spendthrift’s Share the Upside program, whereby mare owners who breed at a fee of $5,000 for the first two seasons earn a lifetime breeding right with no expenses. For those not participating in Share the Upside, Super Ninety Nine will stand at a live foal fee of $4,000.
Unbeaten Australian champion Black Caviar delivered her first foal, a filly by Darley shuttle sire Exceed And Excel, on Saturday in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, Australia.
"She was a champion on the track, and she's proved to be a champion mum with the safe arrival of her first foal overnight," co-owner Neil Werrett said in a statement. "We're incredibly proud that she's given birth to a filly and equally delighted that both Black Caviar and her foal are healthy and doing well.”
They say a good horse can come from anywhere.
But did they really mean to include a place as unlikely as Bowling Green, Ky.?
They must have because one of the leading 3-year-old fillies in North America – Sweet Reason, the winner of the Grade 1 Acorn and Grade 1 Test in New York in her last two starts – was bred in partnership by Beth Harris and her husband, Brent, whose extended family owns 1,000 acres of rich farmland less than 10 miles southeast of Western Kentucky University and the Bowling Green town center.
When Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum acquired the breeding rights for three of the four best 3-year-olds of 2007 to stand at Darley at Jonabell in Kentucky, Any Given Saturday clearly was the third string in the bow behind the champion 2-year-old male and Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense and the Grade 1 winner and Kentucky Derby and Breeders’ Cup Classic runner-up Hard Spun. The pecking order has remained pretty much the same among those three stars at stud, although Hard Spun and Street Sense may have reversed places in the minds of some observers.
Brian Lyle has joined the stallion sales team at B. Wayne Hughes’s Spendthrift Farm in Lexington, Ky., the farm announced Thursday.
A 17-year veteran of the Thoroughbred industry, Lyle previously worked for seven years as the boarding and stallion seasons manager at Ro Parra’s Millennium Farms.
Grade 3 winner Brethren, a half-brother to classic winner and current leading freshman sire Super Saver, will stand the 2015 breeding season at Joe and Helen Barbazon’s Pleasant Acres Farm in Willston, Fla.
The 6-year-old Distorted Humor horse stood his debut season in 2014 at Brent Fernung’s Journeyman Stud in Ocala for $6,000. He will stand at Pleasant Acres as the property of Arindel Farm and Winchell Thoroughbreds, and stud fee for 2015 will be announced at a later date.
