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From time to time on this blog, we've looked at what we might call "super nicks," or crosses calculated on immediate ancestors (like, say, the sire and broodmare sire) that are particularly notable for the numbers and class of stakes winners they are providing. In the current era, none would surpass a cross we've considered in detail before, that of Galileo with...
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We were interested to note the victory of Apapane in the Hanshin Juvenile Fillies (gr. I), the most important contest for two-year-old females in Japan. The race has been won in recent years by such stars as Buena Vista and Vodka, and Apapane was scoring for the third straight time in four starts. Apapane (TrueNicks rated A++ ) is by Kingmambo ( TrueNicks , SRO...
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Sea the Stars has rightfully dominated the headlines from Europe but the other story of the weekend was the remarkable performance of horses bred and owned by the Aga Khan. We'll start with the 2½ mile Prix du Cadran (gr. I), which went to Alandi (TrueNicks A ), who is by Galileo out of the stakes winning Darshaan mare, Aliya, and is one of no less than five...
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Mineshaft and his family were major winners over the Feb. 24-25 weekend. On Saturday, Little Belle took the Busher Stakes at Aqueduct. A daughter of A.P. Indy, she is out of Dubai Belle, a Mr. Prospector mare who is three-parts sister to Prospectors Delite, the dam of Mineshaft (Dubai Belle is by Mr. Prospector out of Flagbird, a grade I winning half sister to...
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The 6-year-old Giant’s Causeway horse Angliana, who captured his first stakes with a win in last week's Aqueduct Handicap, has a very clever pedigree pattern. Out of the graded stakes winning Jade Hunter mare Pratella, he earns an A TrueNicks score on the basis of the extremely successful Giant's Causeway/Mr. Prospector cross-one that has also produced grade...
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Click here to read part I Things get really tricky for a system when lack of opportunity forces a default to deeper generations for analysis (which happens less frequently with TrueNicks than with hypothetical systems that depend on a much smaller-and problematically incomplete-sample size). It's one thing, for instance, to rate Storm Cat when mated to mares...
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In his first crop, Kingmambo sired El Condor Pasa - a champion in Japan and France - out of a mare by Sadler's Wells. Kingmambo has gone on to sire seven other stakes winners out of Sadler's Wells mares, including classic winners Divine Proportions and Virginia Waters and current European juvenile standouts Henrythenavigator and Thewayyouare. Obviously, a great...
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by Alan Porter The launch of TrueNicks represents the completion of a full circle regarding my involvement in the Thoroughbred industry. By age 19 I had completed three years of “hands on” experience working at an English stud farm. Around that time, the English magazine Stud & Stable published an article with a grid showing sire line crosses and the percentage...
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