Fact Of The Week: Standard Bearers

Zoffany has earned top-class mares after his performance in year one | Coolmore

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Doing well with your first set of runners is neither a prerequisite nor a guarantee of ultimate success as a stallion. But there are certainly strong indicators that a sire's merits do in fact appear quite early. Traditionally, in Britain and Ireland in any case, we tend to quantify freshman sire success by the number of individual winners a stallion gets in his first year. This ranking is the most likely to lead us astray when trying to identify future stars. In the table of sires with 30 or more winning first-crop 2-year-olds, which features 16 sires, only half of them have managed to maintain a percentage of stakes winners higher than five during their careers. And make no bones about it, for some getting a large number of winning youngsters in their first crop was probably all that was ever intended by their connections.

The other two rankings are, needless to say, full of quality. Ranked by the average Timeform rating of their best 10 runners, Frankel takes top spot, a position that he has also maintained after year two. Zoffany is the interesting prospect here as he's earned top-class mares after his performance in year one. From the 11 sires listed in this table, only Kheleyf–who covered lesser mares than many of his rivals here–has failed to deliver a lasting impression. Kudos to the Irish National Stud's Invincible Spirit and Coolmore's Mastercraftsman for making it on to both rankings while also continuing to produce very respectable ratios of stakes winners.

So, for the class of 2018, 30 individual winners and/or an average Timeform rating of 100 or higher for the best 10 runners should make all of us sit up and take note.

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