re: Sunland Synchronicity

Alan Porter — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:47:15 GMT

Hi Sceptre,

I think there are a variety of factors at work. The leading freshman sires definitely get books of mares that are stronger numerically and in quality than stallions in a similar price-range.

I think there is also a tendency for connections of these horses to often push on with them early in the first crop (there used to be quite a few "manufactured" leading freshman - remember An Eldorado and Matsadoon?).

In terms of covers, during a given time period, or culmulatively, it might depend on the individual. There are some arguments about the number of covers per day, or time of day of cover, but some stallions don't seem to suffer from repeated Southern Hemisphere travel and big books - Danehill would be one example.

re: Sunland Synchronicity

sceptre — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:43:26 GMT

Hi Alan,

I'm not one who ususally focuses on such things (raw stats), but your mention of the sires of the winners of the two big races at Sunland reminded me of something I've noticed of late.- There seems to be an overabundance of first year sires making the leading list of two-year-old sires. I took a quick glance at the ranking/respresentatives of the leading US 2 yr. old sires over the past seven years which revealed: 2011-3rd and 5th place occupied by freshman sires; 2010-5,7,9; 2009-1,2,4,10; 2008-1,5,7,9; 2007; 3,4,5,9; 2006; 2,3,6,7; 2005-3,5,8,9. As said, there seems to be a relative overabundance of freshman sires within this group. You have better access to the numbers relating to total US sire population and, more importantly, yearly numbers of offspring by all sires other than freshman vs freshman sires. It might be interesting to see how the mathematics/proportions of this plays out. I realize that higher profiile first year stallions receive a relatively larger book size and quality, but not too sure that this, in itself, would account for the disparity-should the aforesaid mathematics not account for it. I'm getting ahead of myself, by must admit having before considered a notion that I much preferred to reject (and was counter to what I had learned and observed) i.e., that either youth alone, or youth and number of ejaculations impact on sperm genetic "quality". I know, this concept seems anti-intellectual/anti-"scientific" and I'm almost embarrassed to mention it, but the numbers, at least superficially, seem somewhat difficult to explain.