Impact Only So Deep Because Broad as Well

Given that his own sire had overcome a pretty mediocre family to become no less potent, it might seem misplaced to insist on due credit for the other genetic contributors to the legacy of Deep Impact (Jpn). On the face of it, after all, the career of Sunday Silence might suggest that the bull–in his case, Halo–really can be more than half the herd.

For some of us, however, even the most successful sire-line can only ever be one strand in a complex mesh–and, as such, there will always be latent influences that combine to produce a runner and/or stallion. To cling stubbornly only to the sire-line, or a combination of sire-lines, is a lazy conflation of statistical convenience (above all, in this era of such huge books) with statistical fact.

And it would be churlish, as such, to survey the striking balance in Deep Impact's pedigree–matching influences starkly associated with both turf and dirt–without wondering whether it might contain lessons for an industry so prescriptive, nowadays, in keeping apart the bloodlines perceived to serve those different disciplines.

Deep Impact was out of Wind In Her Hair (Ire), and duly keeps alive the memory of a true gentleman in her late trainer, John Hills. In finishing second in the Oaks, Wind In Her Hair extended the distinctions clustered around her grand-dam Highclere, who won Classics in England and France in the royal silks and also produced an exceptional matriarch in Height Of Fashion, dam of Nashwan, Unfuwain and Nayef among others.

Height Of Fashion was by Bustino, a son of Busted; while Wind In Her Hair's dam Burghclere was by Busted himself, a slow-burning source of stamina. Highclere's grand-dam Hypericum, meanwhile, won the 1,000 Guineas in the silks of King George VI, while the next dam was placed in both that Classic and the Oaks. So this is a bottom line saturated not just with quality but with chlorophyll–and it was lined up squarely against a great dirt runner in Sunday Silence.

The first thing that leaps out at you, given that Deep Impact was by a son of Halo out of a mare by a grandson of Northern Dancer, is that here is another stallion of international influence (like Danehill) who doubles up the great Almahmoud–as second dam of both Halo and Northern Dancer.

For what it may be worth, moreover, her sire Mahmoud also recurs, top and bottom, lurking behind the dams of both Sunday Silence and Alzao–whose dam Lady Rebecca was by Sir Ivor, a son of Mahmoud's grand-daughter Attica.

As an exported Derby winner, Mahmoud is only one of several dynamic European conduits in Lady Rebecca's background. She carries Princequillo and Sir Gallahad on both sides. Turn-To and the brothers Pharamond and Sickle are also there, while her own sire, Sir Ivor, famously made the reverse trip to win at Epsom. In those days, happily, people didn't have the same fatuous prejudice that turf is turf, and dirt is dirt, and never the twain shall meet.

At the top of Deep Impact's pedigree, Halo replicates some of these transatlantic influences, notably as a grandson of Turn-To. Pharamond was grandsire of Halo's dam, Almahmoud's daughter Cosmah; while his sire Hail To Reason's grand-dam was a Sir Gallahad mare.

But it was Sunday Silence's maternal family, combined with a build that found equal disfavour with purists, that made him a serial reject–both in the sales ring, and also when it came to finding a domestic farm prepared to match the Japanese valuation of a superlative dirt runner.

Wishing Well, his dam, was a grand-daughter of Promised Land, a hard-knocking performer in the 1950s. Himself out of a Mahmoud mare, Promised Land achieved his most immediate celebrity as broodmare sire of Spectacular Bid, so while Wishing Well was a Grade II winner on turf you might say there's a bit of dirt efficiency in that neighbourhood.

But Sunday Silence's next several dams were notoriously lacking in accomplishment. True, there was dormant brilliance in his seventh dam, the English Classic winner Cinna. A grand-daughter of a genuine track legend in La Fleche, Cinna was inbred 3×3 to La Fleche's mother Quiver, who was also second dam of her great sire Polymelus. But nobody can get too carried away by these parchments of scroll.

Perhaps there was more alchemy than could be guessed, however, through Wishing Well's dam–who was by an Argentinian grandson of Hyperion named Montparnasse. His first four dams were all bred in the Pampas, so who can say what kind of hybrid spark may have been preserved down there, igniting only once restored to the Northern Hemisphere mainstream?

The theory goes that Sunday Silence fortuitously stumbled on a gene pool that gave him a chance he would never have taken in Kentucky. But the fact is that his principal heir brought together genes of a breadth and balance you only get with the kind of adventure largely resisted by American and European breeders in recent times.

Even in creating his own empire, in Japan, Deep Impact himself suffered from the way reputations become self-fulfilling according to environment. His most proficient European runner, Saxon Warrior, had a turf family but a running style tailormade for dirt. Kept to grass, he ended up being viewed as rather an enigma, without an optimum distance. Who knows? Had Saxon Warrior been tried on dirt, he might now be standing at Ashford, instead of in Co Tipperary.

That way, the legacy of his grandsire might yet have found some expression on the surface across which Sunday Silence achieved greatness. As it is, Deep Impact has been taken from us at 17, living only a year longer than his sire. And, with his books dominated by turf mares, you have to doubt whether the versatility and variegation stored in his pedigree will ever be allowed to percolate with the same freedom.