BREEDING FORUM

Posted: **Fri Dec 10, 2021 10:42 am**

I have been very busy working through pedigrees for clients and as you all know I spend hours looking at statistics and numbers and trends and results and so on. I like to think I deal in facts but I actually realised today that I possibly don’t.
I was looking at a mares pedigree with a view to finding her a nice stallion with positive affinities that would at least start us on a process which will give us a nice foal. The mare was smart a Group winner and Group placed. She is quite a young mare. I started out looking at the key ancestors in her pedigree, (well you have to start somewhere).
Her second dam’s sire was Trempolino. Who can ever forget that Arc in 1987. It was in my opinion one of the better Arc’s and the manner of victory was breathtaking. This was without doubt a proper racehorse. He was retired to stand initially in the USA but was repatriated to France a few years later and lived to a good old age.
His stud record was very modest, so if you are a number cruncher like me you tend to skate over the history, you live by the numbers you die by the numbers. But I am not really like that. I like to find out if possible why he was such a disappointing sire. And I think I might have an explanation other than the usual one which was he was useless, had a poor pedigree, what do you expect.
In this case I think he simply fell between two eras. He was by Sharpen Up and that was only part of his problem, he was out of a Vice Regal mare who herself was out of a mare by Molvedo. Its all top class breeding and probably a good example of the sort of breeding that was highly successful in the early 20th century. Its that blend of Classic class and Stoutness that was so successful for Tesio. However when he gets to stud in 1988 everything had changed. US/Canadian bred Northern Dancers and Mr Prospectors were all the rage as stallions even though the best early ones here went back to the USA.
When you look at the stakes winners by Trempolino you see that his major affinities were with Nasrullah, Nearco, Tom Fool, Mahmoud, Northern Dancer was 5th on the list, Tantieme, Hail to Reason, Aureole and so it goes on like a section from an old stud book. He was always going to struggle especially in the USA where he might have found plenty of Nasrullah and Tom Fool but even Hail To Reason was fast disappearing by then.
So I look at the numbers and think OK they are not great but they are probably more than the sum of the parts, how you give that a numerical value I have no idea but one thing I know is that having the facility to generate data without the knowledge and understanding of history is never going to be enough.