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While Medaglia d'Oro's sale to Darley may have temporarily averted the spotlight towards the son of El Prado (IRE) (TrueNicks,SRO) , young Gainesway stallion Tapit (TrueNicks,SRO) continues to duke it out with him in the production of stakes winners. Malibu Beach became stakes winner number six for Tapit June 5 when she won the Alyssum Stakes at Belmont.

A graduate of the Fasig Tipton Midlantic sale, the filly was tied for quickest at a quarter-mile at that sale -- covering the distance in :21 2/5 -- where she was consigned by Randy Miles. Malibu Beach was out of the now-18-year-old winning Copelan mare McCaskill, who is a half-sister to stakes winner and grade III producer Bright Bliss. At the time of her sale, the then-unnamed Malibu Beach was rated A++ at the Mid-Atlantic sale with stakes winners Purge, Namaste's Wish, Garibaldi, and Patriot Act already stakes winners bred on the A.P. Indy/Copelan cross (or, more specifically, the cross of "A.P. Indy (TrueNicks,SRO) and all his sons and grandsons when mated to mares by Copelan"). Later in 2008 when Malibu Beach was just coming back in training, another son of A.P Indy, Aidrie Stud's young sire Friends Lake (TrueNicks,SRO), was represented by stakes winner Merus Miami (out of a Copelan mare), adding further weight to the cross.

Given a little time after the sale to find her feet, Malibu Beach came up just a half-length short in her debut Aug. 24 at Delaware and her trainer put her on the shelf until May this year. The grey filly was a comfortable 3 1/4-length winner as the 2-5 chalk in her first start back and now comes back as a stakes winner for her owner.

TrueNicks ratings are recalibrated nightly when all the new foals, runners, and stakes winners gathered from around the world are updated in The Jockey Club Information Services' database -- so you will notice that the ratings and "best horses bred on the cross" will change from time to time.  (Although the TrueNicks variant score will rise or fall slightly with new data, the proprietary TrueNicks letter-grade rating, which incorporates a range in the variant calculations, does not change dramatically in most circumstances.) Malibu Beach is a good example of how TrueNicks returns the most relevant possible rating, based on results from around the world.

As we said, ratings are not recalibrated until late at night, so shortly after the race was run, we ran a hypothetical mating for Malibu Beach. She was still an A++ on the calculation of A.P. Indy/Copelan. A day later, we ran the report again and while the rating remained the same A++, she was now calculated on the cross of "Pulpit and all his sons when mated to mares by Copelan", a more relevant mating to Malibu Beach.

Filed under: Recent Winners, Validity