Sigh! (was Arabian Stallion in IL)

["guest@endurance.net" <guest@endurance.net>]

K S SWIGART   katswig@earthlink.net


Bette Lamore said:

> Thanks, Dawn
> You're right!
> Bette
> 
> RDCARRIE@aol.com wrote:
>> 
>> <<(what WAS the name of that stallion
>> who won the Triple Crown and whose get never did squat, Tom???)>>
>> 
>> I think you're thinking of Secretariat...
>> 
>> Dawn in Texas (delurking again...)

No, you're not right. Despite general impressions to the contrary
(as evidenced by the statements above), Secretariat was NOT an 
ineffective sire (and I am not talking about his success as a 
broodmare sire either), and it is TOTALLY inaccurate to say that
"his babies didn't do squat" on the track.  He was the sire of 3 
champions, one was Horse of the Year, and since they have only 
named one of those a year for the last 30 years, this puts him 
in pretty rare company as a sire, i.e. of the hundreds of 
thousands of TB sires in the last 30 years only 23 of them have 
sired a Horse of the Year (Secretariat, Forego, John Henry, 
Affirmed, and Cigar were Horse of the Year more than once).  
He has over $30 million in progeny earnings; more than 50% of 
his foals were winners and 9% were stakes winners.  His sire 
index was ~3.5 (which means his babies won 3 1/2 times as much 
money on the track as the average stallion in the same foal 
crops).  By any measure he was an extremely successful sire 
of race horses (not just broodmare sire).  Was he ever at the 
top of the General Sire rankings?  No.  Was he a great of a 
sire as his own sire (Bold Ruler) was? No...but then, Bold 
Ruler was the sire of Secretariat and the number of stallions 
that have sired horses like Secretariat can be counted on your 
hands.

The reason that there is a prevailing impression that Secretariat 
was an unsuccessful sire is that expectations were SO high...and
his first baby was a dud.  The people who persist in this notion 
have never bothered to look at the statistics.

What, you say, does this have to do with endurance? 

I mention it only because I have the statistics available to 
refute the general impressions about Secretariat's success as 
a sire.  The Jockey Club and all the other TB registries actually 
keep track of this kind of thing (that is, after all, why they 
even exist).  I have access to progeny earnings, percentage of 
runners, percentage of winners, etc. because there exists very 
effective database with all this information in it that is 
published weekly, annually, is available historically from the 
earliest years of racing and breeding of Thoroughbreds, and (for 
a price) is available on line.

Until people actually have a way of quantifying success, keeping 
track of performances AND pedigree, knowing which sires (and 
dams) are the producers of successful endurance horses will be 
limited by "general impressions" which, as we have seen in the 
case of Secretariat, can be WAAAAAY off the mark.

Good breeders will evaluate the outcome of their own breeding 
decisions and, hopefully, adjust their breeding programs appropriately.  
Really serious breeders will try to keep track of other successful 
breeding pairings and incorporate that information into their own 
breeding programs.  Everybody else will just rattle off the names 
of famous horses that they recognize and figure that since they 
recognize them, they must be good producers (which may or may 
not be true).  Until somebody takes the time and effort to actually 
track both pedigree and performance (of all of a horse's progeny, 
not just the ones that we take notice of at rides) of endurance 
horses, linking pedigree to performance will be nothing more than 
general impressions...which can be wildly inaccurate.

kat
Orange County, Calif.