Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Justify pedigree follows a Triple Crown pattern
How do you breed a Triple Crown winner? Short answer: Breed the dam of at least two high-quality stakes winners to a leading sire.
That description, of course, could be applied to hundreds of foals born every year, but only 13 out of the thousands of foals matching those qualifications born in America in the 102 years since Sir Barton was foaled at Hamburg Place in 1916 have won the Triple Crown. Still, that is the best summary description available of the average short pedigree of the 13 Triple Crown winners.
Seven of the 13 sires of Triple Crown winners led the American sire list at least once for a total of 27 sire championships. And Scat Daddy, sire of 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify, led the sire list in Chile four times and stands in second place on the 2018 general sire list, about $1 million behind leader Candy Ride. If Justify remains as dominant for the second half of the season and Scat Daddy’s other prominent runners such as champion Lady Aurelia and Grade 1 winners Mendelssohn, Daddys Lil Darling, Celestine, and Sioux Nation continue to do their part, Scat Daddy seems destined to earn his first American sire championship this season.
Winner of the Grade 1 Champagne Stakes at 2 and the Grade 1 Florida Derby at 3, Scat Daddy is the best horse sired by 2001 American and European champion 2-yearold male Johannesburg and is a full brother to stakes winner Grand Daddy and a halfbrother to stakes winner Antipathy (by A.P. Indy out of Love Style, by Mr. Prospector).
Retired to Ashford Stud in 2008 after breaking down in the Kentucky Derby, Scat Daddy was hardly expected to develop into a leading sire. His success is a testimony to the power of globalism in the contemporary Thoroughbred marketplace. His first American crop featured 10 stakes winners, including Grade 1 winner Lady of Shamrock, and his annual shuttle to Chile yielded 10 Chilean champions and four Chilean sire championships. Although his subsequent American crops continued to produce graded stakes winners, it was the success of European-raced Lady Aurelia, No Nay Never, and Caravaggio that set off the Scat Daddy craze that was evident in the $3 million sale-topping purchase price
of Mendelssohn at Keeneland in 2016.
As of June 10, Scat Daddy had sired 101 black-type winners from 951 foals age 3 and up. That outstanding 10.6 percent strike rate, and 25 Grade 1/Group 1 winners made his sudden death from a heart attack in December 2016 particularly unfortunate. The exploits of Justify and Mendelssohn this year have magnified the depth of that tragedy.
The 13 American Triple Crown winners descend from 12 different female families when traced along the bottom line to the earliest known mare along that line recorded in Volume 1 of the General Stud Book. Only two, Gallant Fox and Assault, descend from the same mare, a mare named Violet, by the Layton Barb, whose further antecedents are unknown.
Since taproot mares like Violet are on average about 25 generations removed from contemporary Thoroughbreds, their influence is obviously inconsequential, but it is clear that dams of Triple Crown winners are almost always truly exceptional broodmares. Ten of the 13 produced at least one other graded stakes winner or the equivalent before the graded system was inaugurated in 1973, and five produced additional Grade 1-level winners.
Those statistics, of course, reflect the mare’s career produce record, and some produced their other good horses after their Triple Crown winner. Justify’s Grade 3-winning half-brother The Lieutenant, by Street Sense, is two years older than Justify, but did not win his Grade 3 until this year. When his breeder, John Gunther’s Glennwood Farm, sold Justify for $500,000 to Win Star-associated Maverick Racing and China Horse Club at the 2016 Keeneland September yearling sale, The Lieutenant was listed in the catalog as a winner at 3.
His dam, Stage Magic, by Ghostzapper, had placed in the Grade 3 Gardenia Stakes, and his second dam, Magical Illusion, by Pulpit, placed in the Grade 1 Coaching Club American Oaks, but you had to read back to his third dam, Grade 3 winner Voodoo Lily, by Baldski, to find a stakes winner.
A good horse, of course, makes his own pedigree, as consignors are wont to say, and Justify has immortalized his own lineage. With only 13 Triple Crown winners in 99 years, figuring out which of the thousands of horses with similar credentials might be the 14th Triple Crown winner is the challenge that makes Thoroughbred racing the world’s greatest game.