OBS March Pedigree Highlights

A few pedigrees that caught my eye in the upcoming sale

The under tack show for the OBS March sale starts tomorrow, and there are 833 two-year-olds cataloged. I looked through the sale and found a few dozen horses that caught my eye on paper, and I’ll be highlighting a few of the most interesting pedigrees here today.

As with buying any horse, there are plenty of considerations besides pedigree that need to be taken into account, but I thought these horses each brought something interesting to the table that may not be apparent with a quick glance at the catalog page. I included photos from the sale here for the horses who had them available, but did not take conformation into account when selecting which horses to discuss off my shortlist.

I tried to go with a mix of horses I expect to be high-level competitors, likely to sell for six figures, and horses I expect to go under the radar and provide opportunities for a bargain, such as state-breds with solid but less commercial pedigrees. They are listed in rough order of preference.

Hip 284 - f. Constitution x Back Flip (Super Saver)

This is my favorite pedigree of the sale. I’m a big fan of this mare, Back Flip, and in fact highlighted another one of her foals on an old blog post (that foal, a $150k two-year-old, has been working steadily since the beginning of the year and posted a bullet gate work at Palm Meadows on March 1st). She’s heavily linebred to female family 1x, with her sire and first two damsires all hailing from that deep family. She is inbred 4x3 to Dance Number via her damsire Not For Love and his full sister Get Lucky, the second dam of Super Saver. She has four crosses of Buckpasser, the broodmare sire of Dance Number as well as of her second damsire Irish Open (another member of family 1x who, like Dance Number, comes from the Striking branch of the family) and Super Saver’s paternal grandsire Wavering Monarch.

Back Flip comes from family 9b, via the same Lazy Susan branch horses such as as Hall of Famer Dark Mirage and G1 winners such as Medaglia d’Oro, Java Gold, Bluebird, Dublin, Timely Writer, Malibu Prayer, Daaher, and Spun Sugar, among others - her second dam, Taft Lil Queen, is a full sister to the dam of Daaher and Spun Sugar. She herself is a half-sister to G1 winner Constellation.