Stud News

Trippi news

The new racing season in USA is starting to gain momentum. Trippi had two more winners there last weekend. Both 4yo fillies Gabbywitha and Turnout won over 1400m and 1100m respectively. At home his daughter Agra scored an impressive new track record when sent out by Justin Snaith to raid the Eastern Cape over 1100m, scoring her 3rd win in 5 starts... beating the highly rated Vivalda in a scorching 61.21secs.

TDN published a report by Bill Oppenheim last week (Headline News 13th Feb) on the Top 50 Global Sires, which makes absolutely fascinating reading and gives perspective as to how Trippi continues to deliver at the top end in the USA. He calls this table Lifetime Unique A Runners, and deals with named foals of racing age. His detailed report, and the data tabled at the end, all deals with Bill’s lifetime work of rating stallions. His quest is to make sense out of stallion excellence as opposed to merely publishing stats based on who won the most money. He reports that these A category horses hail from only 0.715% of foals born who win Gr1-Gr2 races. He also notes that only 3 of the top 20 are still active (the other being retired or dead).

So obviously the up-and-coming younger sires like Tapit feature lower on the list, despite being the hottest sire in the USA at present. Top of the list is AP Indy with Pathfork's sire Distorted Humour in 4th place, ahead of the best sire in the world, Galileo, back in position 10. That speaks volumes for those in the top 10. The list that has AP Indy in poll position with 13.55% A rated foals drops steeply to 9.54% to the sire in slot number 5 and to 8.47% to Galileo in 10th position. I prefer to group them in ranges, and in doing this give each of the top 3 their own group as they are all percentage points apart from each other. I then group the others into categories that are half a percentage point apart – it gives some perspective to the competition. This places Galileo amongst the top 5 and with 6.14% Trippi is coupled with the likes of Pivotal, Green Desert, Ghostzapper etc tied for 11th slot.

The following extract gives you a snap shot of what he is aiming at in this report:

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENTS

The Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, soon the Oscars... yes, it’s awards season in movie and TV land. We live in a different segment of the entertainment industry, and we have our own awards ceremonies. And now it’s time for some Lifetime Achievement Awards in the stallion business. When we do the calculations for sires’ APEX (Annual Progeny Earnings index) ratings, as you know, the calculations are made on a rolling seven-year basis, so the figures we’ve been studying the last few weeks cover the years 2006-2012. But every time we do the calculations, we also add to a couple of other databases we keep. One is a file of cumulative “Unique A Runners’ (we abbreviate as ‘Uniq A’), in which a horse is counted as an A Runner just once, no matter how many times it scores as an A Runner during a seven-year rolling period, which results in the A Runner indexes. There have been 35,000 Uniq A Runners since we started counting nearly 30 years ago, so the database is complete in that respect for any sire whose first foals were born in 1981 or later.

The second file is one that developed out of the question, Once you have an A Runner, what’s above that? What’s truly the highest standard we can aspire to measure?

- Freeman Stallions

Breeding to Win – Trippi & Philanthropist

Trippi & Philanthropist were featured on Grant Knowles' Tellytrack program, Breeding To Win, in Jan 2013. This is a copy of the presentation put together by Andrea Barker for the show. Published on Jan 22, 2013

Please click here to view Trippi

Please click here to view Philanthropist

2012 SA Champion freshman Sire Trippi has another USA Stakes winner

Trippi is SA’s newest Champion Freshman sire. He has set a new record in SA for number of stake races won by a crop of 2yo’s. Well done to Drakenstein Stud and the syndicate that own Trippi who also scored another USA stakes win this week. He also had two more winners in USA last weekend and his Gr1 runner finished 5th. Extract of a report from USA follows:

"GOURMET DINNER WINS MAJESTIC LIGHT

Gourmet Dinner’s victory in Sunday's $100,000 Majestic Light is the first stakes race on Haskell Day at Monmouth. The 7-1 chance rallied beneath Javier Castellano to deny Ponzi Scheme by a neck.

Gourmet Dinner was out of action for nearly a year following his runner-up effort in the Grade 2 Fountain of Youth on February 26, 2011. His best effort this season was when third in the May 19 Elkwood Stakes on turf.

The Majestic Light was his first opportunity to travel two turns and he enjoyed it. The Trippi colt was held up rear of the field in the early stages.

In the far turn, Gourmet Dinner started his move four-wide move. As the field swung into the stretch, Ponzi Scheme took over from I'm Steppin' It Up with Gourmet Dinner in hot pursuit. Ponzi Scheme dug deep and fought back along the inside. Gourmet Dinner found more and finished 1 1/16 miles on the fast track in 1:44 1/5.

Gourmet Dinner’s record now stands at 14-5-2-2 for $1,067,277. The Florida-bred won his first three career starts for trainer Peter Gulyas, including the Dr. Fager Stakes and a division of the Florida Stallion Stakes. He changed stable and rallied for second in the In Reality division. He scored a career best in the lucrative Delta Jackpot and ended 2010 with a fourth in the Grade 1 Cash Call Futurity. He also placed in both the Grade 3 Holy Bull and Fountain of Youth.”

- Freeman Stallions

The two New Champions have arrived

Pathfork and Philanthropist have landed safely in the Cape and are now happily in quarantine.

It has taken months to get everything in place and from the time they left their respective northern Hemisphere point of embarkation to get here has taken a week of moving and holding and moving. An arduous journey in anyone’s language. Organising to bring these two new sires direct to the Cape has been quite a costly mission. The expense unavoidable as having them here in time for the season was prime consideration. We are grateful to all concerned. Kevin Connolly delivered the goods and we are most grateful to Dr Norman Datnow and professional groom Jono for their care. Norman flew to Luxembourg to accompany the two horses on their way home as an added precaution and he kept us informed regularly of their well-being. Thank you.

Thankfully Hayley at the Milnerton Quarantine Station is in charge. We expect them to be able to move at the end of the month: Pathfork to Highlands and Philanthropist to Drakenstein.

Cape Photographers Equine Edge kindly lent me a photographer armed with a long distance lens last Friday to see if we could sneak a few shots of the horses as they were transferred to the truck. Our quest not as easy as it sounds: firstly we had to keep our distance for “health and safety” reasons (but this didn’t stop the airport staff from crowding the process eager to sneak a peek at the valuable cargo) and secondly the horses load straight from the jet-stalls into the truck - a distance of less than three meters. After hours of standing in the cold and rain waiting for the paperwork to be completed, the whole loading process was all over in a few minutes. The paperwork tedium is unpredictable and avoidable but being there for the excitement and expectation of seeing them was worth the wait. 

The two lads shared a three birth stall - Norman told me that they actually had to get a slightly bigger than normal pallet as these boys are not ponies. The tractor pulled the train of stalls alongside the truck and as the top flap of the jet-stall was unclipped and folded back Philanthropist was first to stick his head over the door. I had to wonder at his thoughts seeing all these strange new people. The ramp went down, Philanthropist was walked across and before we realised that it was time to sneak some pics it was all over. With due warning and less people in the way we managed to get a few more snaps of Pathfork following the same route.