It took three attempts to produce this great mare, but a perfect mate could be Kingman

Bloodstock breeding is a lottery but Enable’s owner has a fine track record in this field

Getting gunned down in a Parisian quagmire took nothing away from one of the greatest race mares we have ever seen. Enable won the Prix de l’arc De Triomphe twice plus a heap of other top races; but her blinding turn of foot was blunted by the French mud.

So as the first half of her illustrious career appears to draw to a close, thoughts have already turned to her future as a broodmare. Can she possibly match the legacy of her great grand mother, Urban Sea, who also won the Arc De Triomphe?

For the record, Urban Sea is the mother of Galileo, the 2001 Derby winner who has sired four Derby winners as well as superstars Frankel and Nathaniel. She also bore Sea The Stars, winner of the 2,000 Guineas, Derby, Eclipse, Juddmonte International and Arc in 2009. Her legacy is embellished year on year through the offspring of these four extraordinary stallions.

Enable could be in no better hands than those of Prince Khalid Abdullah, who is a through and through breeder. He bought Enable’s great grandmother Fleet Girl from Dr Herbert Schnapka in 1982 and has been responsible for planning the matings of that family ever since.

While judgment, intuition and deep pockets are required to give a breeder the best chance of producing a top horse, luck is also a huge factor because nobody can accurately predict how the chromosomes will hook up. That is why the full brothers and sisters of champions sometimes have neither the ability, nor the inclination, to run fast enough to keep themselves warm. Take the strategy to breed Enable, for example. It was basically Plan C that finally succeeded.

Plan A was a liaison with Oasis Dream, a speedy sprinter. It was a logical mating, as Concentric, the mother of Enable, came from a family who were mostly middle distance horses.

But Tournament, the product of that plan, never raced for Prince Khalid and was sold. So Plan B was to go to Champs Elysees, who was at his best over a mile and a

Liaisons with a sprinter and a miler failed to produce a winner, but Plan C finally succeeded

quarter. This produced a horse called Contribution, who was an improvement on Plan A, but not a dramatic improvement.

At this stage Concentric was no golden hen, and that may have emboldened Prince Khalid and his advisers to give Nathaniel, a true mile-and-a-half stayer, a crack. And, bingo, the rest is history.

So which lucky stallion will be Plan A for Enable? This may be quite a conundrum for Prince Khalid and his team.

She is already quite in-bred, having the remarkable Sadler’s Wells as her grandfather on her mother’s side of the family, and her great grandfather on her sire’s side. Therefore a dream mating with Frankel, also owned by Prince Khalid, is probably not on the cards, because Sadler’s Wells is also his great grandfather

On the one hand, it might be tempting to go for a mile-and-aquarter plus stallion, which worked so well with Enable. However, considered opinion is that continually adopting a strategy of breeding stamina with stamina will produce something that will be pulling the carriages up the straight at Royal Ascot rather than winning a Group One race.

So although a speedy stallion, did not work with Concentric, something similar may be successful for Enable. As luck would have it, Prince Khalid also owns Kingman, who was Europe’s champion three-year-old miler and possessed a potent turn of foot. He would represent an injection of pace into Enable’s bloodline.

Given Prince Khalid’s ethos, he would probably rather support a stallion at his own stud than send Enable elsewhere. Kingman is also free of Sadler’s Wells’ genes, being by Invincible Spirit, a son of an American sire Green Desert.

But no matter how much thought goes into her breeding career, success or failure will be determined by the chromosome lottery.