The alternative Racing Post breeding awards for 2022

Good Morning Bloodstockis Martin Stevens' daily morning email and presented online as a sample.

Here he hands out his own breeding awards for the year. Subscribers can get more great insight from Martin every Monday to Friday, though note that GMB is on its Christmas and new year break now until January 4.

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This is the final Good Morning Bloodstock of 2022, but not the last you’ll hear from me this year, as I’ve written a few features that will appear in the Racing Post in print and online over the festive period.

One of them is my favourite article to put together each year – the paper's annual bloodstock awards. It’s no hardship looking back over the past 12 months in breeding and bestowing honours on the highest achievers, both equine and human.

I’ll level with you, though: the way some events unfolded this year turned a few awards into a foregone conclusion. You won’t win any prizes for correctly guessing the identity of breakthrough sire or breeder of the year, let’s put it that way.

With that in mind, I hereby present the alternative Racing Post bloodstock awards, which take more of a sideways look at the last year and hopefully contain a few more surprises.

Myboycharlie memorial award for unwarranted sale abroad

Named in honour of the son of Danetime who supplied plenty of smart horses from his modestly bred early crops, including Grade 1 winners Euro Charline and Sistercharlie, but still found himself packed off to Turkey due to market forces.

This year’s recipient is Cable Bay, who has left Highclere Stud for India, presumably once again because his owners felt he wouldn’t receive enough support from European breeders next season and beyond to justify turning down the offer from Asia.

It’s a shame if that was the case, as I’ve always regarded the son of Invincible Spirit as a useful sire.

King's Lynn: Group-winning son of Cable BayCredit: John Grossick (racingpost.com/photos)

His first crop of 116 foals, bred off a fee of just £6,500, yielded four black-type winners including the high-class King’s Lynn and Liberty Beach, and a further seven stakes-placed performers, while his second generation contained three more stakes winners and a top-notch sprinter in Dragon Symbol.

Cable Bay has admittedly had a quieter time of it with his smaller third and fourth crops, aged three and two, and that has probably helped seal his fate.

But he continues to fare well in the Racing Post’s tables of sires by ratio of runners by certain RPRs, with 31 per cent running to 80 or higher in Britain and Ireland in 2022 – a similar result to the likes of Ardad, Oasis Dream and Nathaniel – and ten per cent getting a mark of 100 or more, which puts him on a par with Australia and Churchill and above Mehmas.

It’s frustrating that the stallion market is so polarised, with only the creme de la creme and unproven names receiving strong support, leaving statistically solid proven sires like Cable Bay underappreciated and underused.

Hospital pass of the year

For readers who don’t have a firm grasp of idiomatic English, or aren’t nearly as sporty as me, the Collins dictionary defines a hospital pass as one “made to a team-mate who will be tackled heavily as soon as the ball is received”.

Step forward to receive the prize, then, Ed Harper of Whitsbury Manor Stud, who in the autumn found himself bombarded by more breeders wanting nominations to standout first-season sire Havana Grey and the ever-reliable Showcasing than could be catered for, and so promptly hired Joe Callan as head of bloodstock and sales to take the flak.

Joe Callan and Ed HarperCredit: Whitsbury Manor Stud

I’m being facetious, of course. Ed and his right-hand-man Phil Haworth need, and have certainly earned, the extra assistance as the Hampshire farm surges forward as arguably Britain’s most commercially astute stallion operation.

And in Joe, formerly nominations manager at the National Stud and head of Lincolnshire’s finest racecourse, Market Rasen, they have found someone who knows the business inside out and is equipped with the diplomatic skills to manage sold-out stallions and convince breeders to keep supporting the other members of the roster.

Not that mare owners should need their arms to be twisted on that score, as Sergei Prokofiev’s first foals proved popular at the sales in recent weeks and Due Diligence has a larger, more expensively bred crop of two-year-olds to represent him next year.

All in all it looks like the perfect appointment and it could see Whitsbury Manor Stud, also breeder of Dewhurst Stakes hero Chaldean in 2022, take another step forward.

Most flabbergasting and futile stallion comeback

Unbeaten Group 2-winning two-year-old Harbour Watch was strongly supported in his early years standing at Tweenhills, with breeders hoping he would produce fast and precocious progeny in his own image.

Alas, it wasn’t to be, as the well-bred son of Acclamation endured a disappointing freshman season in 2016 and was represented by only a handful of high-class runners in the next few seasons.

His stud career was then cut short by recurrent health issues that sadly also meant he didn’t make old bones, so it looked for all the world as though he was going to be only a minor footnote in the history of British breeding.

Harbour Watch: has re-emerged as a more than capable sireCredit: Mark Cranham

But then, seemingly out of nowhere, the blisteringly quick sprinter and budget sire came up with middle-distance superstar Pyledriver and classy stayer Baron Samedi, while another son, leading Hong Kong miler Waikuku, continues to show more soundness than his sire ever had in his fourth season competing at the top level in the far east.

Harbour Watch is a head-scratcher all right. The revival in fortunes is far too late for his supporters, but perhaps breeders might at least think more kindly of his daughters as producers now.

Most unusual breeder background

A passion for the thoroughbred and the pursuit of breeding a top-class one unites people from all sorts of walks of life.

In the past year or so I’ve spoken to a journalist who reported from the former USSR during the cold war for Le Monde (Jan Krauze, the breeder of multiple Group/Grade 1 heroine Rougir), an opera singer (Jenny Bianco, who co-bred European Free Handicap winner New Science) and an award-winning gin distiller who won €64,000 on the German version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (Alexander Franke, breeder of the last Adlerflug foal).

There’s strong competition for this award, then, but the winner is Gary Robinson, the breeder of Derby hero Desert Crown, because his main claim to fame just sounds so cool. His engineering company developed a breeze-block building material that is both blast-proof and ballistic-resistant.

Gary Robinson with Desert Berry, the dam of Derby hero Desert CrownCredit: Strawberry Fields Stud

I must admit that Gary got extra points in this category because he is a journalist’s dream, providing insightful and amusing quotes.

How did he gain the knowledge to make his Strawberry Fields Stud a Classic nursery? By reading a library’s worth of books on bloodstock, surrounding himself with good people and applying engineering principles to breeding. How did he mark Desert Crown winning the Derby? With a celebratory trifle.

What was Desert Crown’s dam Desert Berry, sold to Coolmore for 1,900,000gns last month, like? She once got loose in Newmarket and crashed through the window of a Turkish restaurant. And what makes her a good mother? She’s not a lovey-dovey mare who makes mummy’s boys and girls, of course.

Fingers crossed Desert Crown returns from injury next year in the same form that saw him win the Dante and Derby so impressively, and that his younger relations fare well too, if only so we can hear more from their breeder.

Biggest surprise that really wasn’t a surprise

Yeats is a good-looking individual by one important influence in National Hunt breeding in Sadler’s Wells out of another in Top Ville, and he was one of the best stayers of the modern era, winning a record-breaking four Gold Cups at Royal Ascot.

So it shouldn’t have been any great surprise that he would one day become champion jumps sire, as he did in the 2021/22 season thanks to Chantry House, Conflated, Flooring Porter and Longhouse Poet, but above all Grand National hero Noble Yeats.

And yet it sort of was, because a lot of breeders deserted him a few seasons ago, causing his book size to drop to only 50 and 60 mares in 2018 and 2019.

Yeats did admittedly get off to a slow start with his jumps progeny, and that probably allowed enough time for rumours about his stock to start swirling, but then his oldest runners (who were more Flat-orientated anyway) are still only 11 years old, so he really didn’t have enough crops competing over fences at the same time for sound judgements about his abilities to be made.

Yeats: had all the credentials to be National Hunt champion sire when he retiredCredit: Edward Whitaker

Innuendo caused by impatience is probably part and parcel of jumps breeding, where there is such a long wait between a sire covering his first books and the resultant progeny being tested on the racecourse, but it is frustrating nonetheless.

You hear the same things about the efficacy of sons of Galileo and Monsun as jumps sires of sires. Perhaps there is sometimes a modicum of truth in those swift and sweeping judgements, but surely not enough to damn every one of their sons purely for that reason, which so often seems to be the case. I note, by the way, that Monsun’s sons Shirocco and Getaway and Galileo’s son Mahler are currently occupying third to fifth place in this season’s sire standings.

Anyway, at least one good thing has come from the market having moved against Yeats before he became champion: his covering fee has still not recovered, and he is available at Castle Hyde next year at a fee of just €5,000. That seems like a bargain to me.

Good Morning Bloodstock will be back on Wednesday, January 4. Sincere thanks to everyone who received, read and interacted with the emails in the past year. It’s heartening to know there are so many other breeding anoraks out there.

What do you think?

Share your thoughts with other Good Morning Bloodstock readers by emailing gmb@racingpost.com

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“Obviously they've moved in a little bit different direction, but it looks like they definitely want to continue to have a presence in American racing with Sheikha Hissa taking over,” says Brad Cox after sending out his first runner – and winner – for Shadwell.

Pedigree pick

Starship Mona, a Telescope filly who makes her debut against colts and geldings in the bumper at Plumpton (3.35), catches the eye as she is the first foal out of Lifeboat Mona, a daughter of the late, great Kayf Tara who won a Fairyhouse point-to-point, Warwick bumper and Huntingdon Listed bumper on her first three starts.

She was bred by breeding savant Bryan Mayoh, carries the silks of The Lifeboat Crew and is in the care of a man who is a dab hand with bumper horses in Anthony Honeyball.

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Good Morning Bloodstock is our latest email newsletter. Martin Stevens, a doyen among bloodstock journalists, provides his take and insight on the biggest stories every morning from Monday to Friday