sires

Now we're really entering nosebleed altitudes for most breeders, between $30,000 and $50,000: a zone where you should feel that you're improving the odds of coming up with an elite horse. It tells you a lot about our business that the majority of the two dozen stallions operating at this level can only do so because they have yet to send a single runner into the starting gate. A quarter of these we immediately set to one side, as absolute beginners, because those received separate consideration in the opening instalment...

Freshman sire Flameaway and multiple Grade I sire Dialed In will together lead the 2024 stallion roster at Darby Dan Farm, the Central Kentucky farm announced in a release Friday afternoon. The pair, each standing for $15,000 S&N, will head a dozen stallions on the Darby Dan roster. A son of Scat Daddy, Flameaway is fourth on North America's freshman sire list with 15 first-crop winners. His 2-year-olds include MGSW Dreamfyre, winner of the GIII Surfer Girl S. Oct. 8 who is pointing to the GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies...

Fees have been set for Spendthrift's four first-crop sires, currently occupying four of the five top spots on the leading freshman sire list in North America, according to a release from the Central Kentucky farm Wednesday. Their fees for the 2024 breeding season were held back when Spendthrift announced the farm's roster and fees in late September. The Spendthrift roster will feature three new stallions in 2024: Taiba (Gun Runner), Arabian Lion (Justify), and Zandon (Upstart). Taiba is already at the farm and will stand for $35,000, while the other...

Four-time leading sire Into Mischief, who has broken records with 15 seven-figure yearlings to sell this year, will head the Spendthrift Farm stallion roster once again for 2024, the Central Kentucky farm announced Thursday afternoon. Into Mischief will stand for $250,000 S&N in 2024, identical to his advertised fee for 2023. Into Mischief is currently leading the general sires list for 2024 by a comfortable margin. His progeny for 2024 include 21 black-type winners, nine graded winners, and four Grade I winners, led by GI Kentucky Oaks winner and 'TDN...

Of the 1,630 stallions who covered mares in North America in 2018, a grand total of up to 34 could have starters in the respective gates of the upcoming GI Kentucky Derby and GI Kentucky Oaks (based on a maximum of 20 Derby starters and 14 Oaks starters). That's about a 2% chance. How remarkable is it, then, that this year we have not one, not two, but seven stallions with the potential to pull off a Derby-Oaks sire double, something that hasn't been done since Native Dancer sired the...

Call it the year of authentication. After sealing his giddy rise with a first sires' championship last year, Into Mischief has retained his title in 2020 with spectacular ease. Indeed, while several of his predecessors have required a single outstanding earner to elevate them above their rivals, this most remarkable of stallions would have secured the laurels even without the $7.17 million banked by a son on the point of formal anointment as Horse of the Year. As it is, we can instead treat his latest champion, Authentic, as immediate...

We are all familiar with the flash-in-the-pan stallions who blaze a trail with their first crop of runners only to sink with relatively little trace in ensuing seasons--a situation doubtless exacerbated by fleeting whims of a commercial market. For the sires whose debutants took to the track in 2019, the results achieved were important in regard to continuing or boosting their appeal to breeders booking mares for the 2020 season, but of even more importance is what happens now that their first crops are of the Classic age. When Dubawi...

In the second installment of TDN Europe's Value Sires Series, we take a look at the sire crop with its first foals due this season. While the first real clues will be laid out once the foals actually hit the ground, many of this intake had in-foal mares go through the ring at the latest round of breeding stock sales, thus providing a minimal amount of data to tear apart. Numbers of mares bred are taken from the Weatherbys Return of Mares published in November 2019. The covering sire returns...