This Side Up: Daughters May Spark Jump Start's Legacy

Here's a hunch, even a wager if you care to stick around long enough. Because I wouldn't be at all surprised should we someday notice the damsire of a new champion and remember, with a smile, the splendid Jump Start.

Pennsylvanian breeders won't need telling what a dynamo among stallions they lost on Sunday. I don't know how many of them will remember Ecliptical, a son of Exclusive Native who arrived there in 2000 at a fee of $750. But if one of Ecliptical's five stakes winners could become the second dam of American Pharoah, then how much more eligibly might daughters of Jump Start show that Pennsylvania, especially in the slots era, is no kind of blind alley for a pedigree?

Because this was no Ecliptical; no hybrid curio. Jump Start was one of those rare migrants from Kentucky who not only became a big fish in a smaller pond, but a sizeable pike even by Bluegrass standards. How many other regional sires have maintained their Kentucky fees the way Jump Start did, holding out at $10,000 through a decade since his arrival? In the meantime he has been the state champion sire five times, runner-up four times; and he's making the early running for a first posthumous title too. Between 2015 and 2017 he was champion Mid-Atlantic sire, while a handful of winter holidays in Argentina yielded a local Horse of the Year among three South American champions.

According to TDN statistics, on lifetime earnings per named foal, he slots between English Channel and Kantharos at $65,341; and his 99 black-type performers represent precisely the same 11.16% of named foals as Uncle Mo, at a superior clip to Candy Ride (Arg), Tiznow, Street Sense, Bernardini and Empire Maker, to name a random sample of stallions too classy to be embarrassed by the comparison.

So this was a highly respectable achiever by any measure, never mind as one so long confined to provincial mares. And while his own star burned as briefly as it did brightly on the track, it's not hard to see why he should have been able to produce stock that was not only talented but also, by modern standards, extremely resilient. Prayer For Relief, for instance, broke his maiden at two yet proceeded to be graded stakes-placed (at least) in each of the next six years. Rail Trip, a Grade I winner at four, was second in the GI Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile at seven. Pants On Fire, though sadly reported to be racing again at 11 in Saudi Arabia last winter, had won (up to Grade II level) in each of six American campaigns.

These old school virtues trace to the seamless, top-to-bottom quality of a pedigree that conspicuously entitles Jump Start's daughters to emerge as broodmare gold.

Never mind the familiar duplication you get from any cross of A.P. Indy with a Storm Cat mare, both being out of famous daughters of Secretariat in Weekend Surprise and Terlingua. In the mating that produced Jump Start, between A.P. Indy and GII Adirondack S. runner-up Steady Cat, the second dam of both was an equally celebrated daughter of another broodmare sire legend, in Buckpasser. One of these is Weekend Surprise's mother Lassie Dear; the other is Hopespringseternal, who produced Miswaki as well as his full-sister Hopespringsforever (Mr. Prospector), the dam of Steady Cat. Miswaki, of course, includes Urban Sea herself–ubiquitous in elite European pedigrees–among his accomplishments as a broodmare sire.

Icing on the cake, for those of us who will always go looking for him, is the fact that Hopespringseternal was out of a Princequillo mare. Princequillo's influence duly spreads right across the page, as he is sire of Secretariat's dam Somethingroyal, whose son Sir Gaylord also sired Lassie Dear's dam Gay Missile.

With all that distaff power behind him–and most people would happily settle for his first three dams being by Storm Cat, Mr. P and Buckpasser–Jump Start's story seems unlikely to reach an end in the grieving, this week, of those who tended him so well (into his 20th year) at Northview Stallion Station. Somewhere out there, perhaps even embryonically among the 36 selected mares Jump Start had covered this spring, is a daughter or two who will surely give a fresh dimension to the legacy of his breeder W.T. Young.

Obviously broodmare sires need time to show their hand. Of those to have exceeded his three black-type winners so far this year, however, only Hard Spun (2004), Bernardini (2003), Tapit (2001), Empire Maker (2000) and Ghostzapper (2000) were born after Jump Start. And on Derby Day, to pull one straw out of the wind, Amy's Challenge (Artie Schiller) gained her second consecutive Grade I placing in the Humana Distaff S., as a $20,000 yearling out of one of his daughters.

Incidentally, if you have only clocked the strength of Jump Start's page now that it's too late, you could still give Claiborne a call. Their young stallion Mastery (Candy Ride {Arg}) is out of a three-parts sister to Jump Start, by A.P. Indy's son Old Trieste out of Steady Cat. Like Jump Start, of course, Mastery hit the buffers too soon when injuring himself after taking the GII San Felipe. Jump Start's own career ended in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile, so his GII Saratoga Special turned out to be as good as it got. As we've seen, however, this family nonetheless seems to produce toughness as well as class.

And if grass is nowhere quite as blue as at Claiborne, then that's a measure of what Jump Start took with him from Overbrook to Pennsylvania. Had it not been for the death of his breeder, he might never have left Kentucky. As it was, he proved as equal as any regional sire to the opportunities arising from the slots-driven decentralisation of the purses needed to make a racing stable viable. And nor, I'll bet, have we heard the last of him.