Fasig-Tipton Midlantic Fall Yearling Selections

Some pedigree picks for today and tomorrow

Today marks the beginning of Fasig-Tipton’s Midlantic Fall Yearling sale, a sale that has recently produced the likes of millionaire graded stakes winner Cordmaker, who sold here for $150,000 in 2016; millionaire and G1 winner Henley’s Joy, who sold for $20,000 at this sale in 2017; multiple graded stakes winning millionaire Field Pass, who sold for $37,000 at this sale in 2018; and multiple graded stakes winner Call Paul, who sold at this sale for just $20,000 in 2017 before selling for $210,000 as a two-year-old.

With the opportunity for quality racehorses at reasonable prices, I want to highlight some of the more promising prospects in the sale as well as some horses I think will be overlooked by the market and could provide good value.

Hip 142 - f. Unified x Graceland Kitten (Kitten’s Joy)

This filly is particularly intriguing to me, with a significantly inbred dam being bred to a horse who was also fairly inbred but to different ancestors. This filly’s only 5-generation inbreeding is two copies of Northern Dancer in the fifth generation - her 8-generation coefficient of inbreeding is quite low at 1%. There’s also plenty of mitochondrial family duplication throughout the pedigree here, with a repeating pattern of combining families 2 and 4.

Though Graceland Kitten was unraced, she’s a full sister to the graded stakes winner Holiday For Kitten and both of her foals to race are winners. Her first foal, by Lookin at Lucky, was a winner in a maiden optional claiming race at Turf Paradise as a three-year-old and has been a fairly consistent check-getter in claiming races at lower tier tracks, while her current three-year-old, by Constitution, was a winner for a $62,500 tag at Santa Anita as a two-year-old but hasn’t been seen since a close third-place effort at that track in February for a $50,000 tag.

The cross of Candy Ride over Kitten’s Joy has seen limited starters, but exceptional preliminary success, with three stakes winners from just eight starters (37.5%) bred on the cross.

The most interesting thing about this pedigree, though, is the pattern of combining families 2 and 4, or the “L4a” and “I2a1” mitochondrial haplotypes, respectively.

Unified is from family 2o, and his sire and first through third damsires are all from the “I2a1” haplotype - Candy Ride’s family 13c, Dixie Union’s family 4m, Carson City’s family 4r, and Storm Bird’s family 4j are all that same genetic family. The combination with family 2 can be seen in Dixie Union’s sire Dixieland Band, another member of family 4m by family 2d’s Northern Dancer, as well as in Storm Bird, a member of family 4j by Northern Dancer. Unified’s fifth damsire, Secretariat, is family 2s, tracing to Imperatrice, who Graceland Kitten brings in two more unique strains of.

Graceland Kitten is from family 4r (both she and Carson City trace to the 1853 mare Kitty Clark), by family 2d’s Kitten’s Joy, whose second damsire is family 4g’s L’Enjoleur. Kitten’s Joy is the source of one of the additional strains of Imperatrice via Sir Gaylord, a half-brother to Secretariat and the sire of El Prado’s damsire Sir Ivor. Graceland Kitten’s second damsire, Cure the Blues, is out of Speedwell, a half sister to Secretariat’s dam Somethingroyal by his sire Bold Ruler. Interestingly, Imperatrice was herself heavily linebred to this “L4a” mitochondrial family - her sire and damsire both traced to family 2o’s Briat-Root (5x5 in the pedigree of Imperatrice), while her second damsire Teddy was a member of family 2h, and she had four additional sources of family 2 in the first five generations.

Cure the Blues’ sire, Stop the Music, and grandsire, Hail to Reason, are both also from the “I2a1” mitochondrial haplotype, making him another example of this combination. Lear Fan, to whom Graceland Kitten is inbred 3x3, is from the closely related “I2a2” mitochondrial haplotype as a member of family 20.

Whether this pattern will result in a top-class racehorse remains to be seen, but as a New York bred, she doesn’t necessarily have to be a world-beater to be a useful racehorse, and anecdotally it seems as those this kind of repetition in female lines seems to have beneficial results. Rationally, we’re looking at a collection of horses in the pedigree who have had a beneficial combination of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA (as evidenced by the class of the stallions involved), so there’s reason to think that returning Unified to the “I2a1” haplotype carried by many of his ancestors will lead to a beneficial result. When combined with the relative lack of inbreeding in the first five generations, and the success of the direct sire line nick, I think this filly is a fascinating prospect who has to be considered if she looks the part.