Mr. Prospector

A few weeks ago, I was a guest on the weekly Going In Circles podcast, which is hosted by Chuck Simon, the former trainer who's also a top-notch writer at his blog, and Barry "The Sniper" Spears, an excellent handicapper and well-known figure on Twitter. Simon asked for my opinion on which stallion I'd consider to be the most influential of the past 50 years. You can listen to a nine-minute clip of the conversation here. My answer? Claiborne's iconic Mr. Prospector, of course. The clip generated quite a bit...

Solera Farm in Williston, Florida will hold an open house on Sunday, Jan. 22 from Noon to 3 p.m. (EST). Veteran sire Greatness (Mr. Prospector) and the Into Mischief son Rogueish (Into Mischief) will both stand for a stud fee of $2,500 for a live foal. All mares pregnant to Rogueish offered during OBS January will sell with a complimentary, no guarantee 2023 season to Rogueish, which may be used on any mare of their choice. The only son of Into Mischief standing in Florida, this sire has 11 yearlings...

Covering numbers are more an indication of fashion than of success but, this being, as we so often hear, "a numbers game", it is worth having a closer look at the Flat stallions in Britain and Ireland who have been gifted books into three figures this year. We will also be looking in more depth at the French covering numbers in the coming days. According to the statistics recently published by Weatherbys in the annual Return of Mares, there were 62 stallions who covered 100 or more mares in 2022,...

GSW Cape Canaveral (Mr. Prospector--Seaside Attraction, by Seattle Slew) passed away at age 26 at Highfield Stock Farm in Canada, where he stood for 14 years. He had been battling severe cellulitis and was humanely euthanized. He was pensioned last fall. Cape Canaveral has been one of the leading sires in Canada since 2008 with 20 crops of racing age, 541 foals, 429 starters, 21 black-type winners, 315 winners of 1,080 races and earnings of over $17.8 million. Out of GI Kentucky Oaks winner Seaside Attraction, Cape Canaveral raced for...

I guess the whole point is that ours is a world apart, a sanctuary from the cares of the "real" one. But it still feels unnerving, to see a new cycle of the sales calendar open with such blithe indifference to a wider consensus that the global economy is scrabbling along the top of a precipice. Both Saratoga and Deauville benefit from a heady atmosphere that might easily induce a perilous incaution when a yearling stands there shimmering on a sale rostrum. But it was ever thus, and the market...

Dance Brightly (Mr. Prospector--Dance Smartly, by Danzig) died at the age of 27 in Chile, Turf Diario reported. The Sam-Son Farm homebred raced for trainer Mark Frostad and ran out a maiden special weight winner at Woodbine in October 1997. The Ontario-bred then ran second in the Listed Coronation Futurity later in his juvenile season, but was ultimately retired due to an injury suffered in a workout in 1998. A son of Canadian Horse of the Year and Canadian Triple Crown heroine Dance Smartly started his stud career at Hill...

For half a century, Arthur Boyd Hancock III has called Stone Farm home. It is a tract of land where, as the nursery's website succinctly states, the team is 'trying to raise you a good horse.' To say they've achieved that goal over the years would be an understatement of monumental proportions. The list of animals that have grown up on that stretch of Bourbon County Bluegrass include stakes winners too numerous to mention; horses from A to Y, including Classic-winning and Classic-placed runners like Gato del Sol, Risen Star,...

TDN is proud to partner with the Keeneland Library and the Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries in a very special collaboration: the Keeneland 'Life's Work' Oral History Project, a series of filmed interviews by TDN columnist Chris McGrath with significant figures in the Thoroughbred industry. The current installment, with Gus Koch of Claiborne Farm, appears here. Legends, to you and me. Immortals, paragons. But to Gus Koch, they were the flesh-and-blood companions of his daily toil: some were cherished friends; others, just a pain...

Lack of clarity isn't the same as lack of quality. A crop that produces a standout sophomore will sometimes be weaker than those, like the current one, that rotate the laurels. Either way, however, we should as usual have a better sense of where we stand after the GI Runhappy Travers S.--where the Classic veterans will either prove themselves to have been too faintly praised, or allow a later developer to come along and pick up the pieces. Certainly the Aug. 24 showdown should help to identify who bears the...