Trippi News

Trippi - May 2013

May 2013

In Eight Days won at Vaal 7th
Romantic Balladeer won at Scottsville 8th
Diva’s Daughter won at Fairview 10th
Agra won at Kenilworth 11th
Legal Trip won at Kenilworth 14th
Night Trip won at Kenilworth 14th
Here Comes Drz won at Belmont 18th
In Eight Days won at Vaal 21st
Lanner Falcon won at Durbanville 22nd
Need You Tonight won at Calder 25th

Trippi - April 2013

Monthly Winners

Doris Duke won at Durbanville 3rd
Journeyman won at Turffontein 4th
Megalith won at Calder 13th
Starship Freedom won at Calder 14th
Triplication won at Fairview 19th
Kings Over won at Calder 21st
Cotton Country won at Kenilworth 24th

Trippi - March 2013

Winners

Franny won at Clairwood Park 3rd
Trip Poker won at Durbanville 6th
Vero’s Hero won at Gulfstream Park 7th
Tempestuous won at Kenilworth 9th
For The Lads won the Ruffian Stakes at Turffontein 9th
Soldiersailor won at Vaal 14th
Travelin Man won the Sir Shackleton S at Gulfstream Park 30th

Trippi - February 2013

Winners

Agra won at Fairview 8th
Turnout won at Laurel Park 16th
Hey Babe won at Aqueduct 21st

Trippi update

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