Champion racemare-Broodmare Flop

Mare A has eight foals, four of whom are fillies B, C, D and E.  

                  Total opportunity in 1st generation (sons and daughters): 8

Mares B, C, D and E have eight foals each, four of whom are fillies F, G, H and I.

                         Total opportunity in 2nd generation (grandsons and granddaughters): 32

And so it goes on.

Doesnt that make you want to look at her page to see where "it" may be coming from?

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From those percentages it might look like mares with no form, little form, moderate form performed as well as high class race mares in producing classic winners.

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This was the classification of a random sample of 1,000 mares

Never ran 36.5%; Ran but no form 29.5%; Showed moderate form 14.5%; Fair winners 16.6%; Good winners 2.5%; High class race mares 0.4%

You can see that a tiny percentage of top race mares 0.4% produced  12.2% of classic winners.

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Comments in the article

"high class race mares were 30 times as frequent in the dams of classic winners as in thoroughbred mares in general"

"72% of the aristocracy of the turf, we see, are from mares that showed some sort of form, and over 50% are from mares which had considerable racing ability, and 26% from mares which had great racing ability."

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In the 1912 Bloodstock Breeders Review J B Robertson categorised sires into sprinters (PP), intermediate (PR), stayers (RR) and stated that a sprint sire could only produce a sprinter (PP) or an intermediate (PR) foal, a stayer (RR) could only produce an intermediate (PR) or a staying (RR) foal, and an intermediate sire (PR) and an intermediate dam (PR) would produce sprinters (PP), intermediates (PR) and stayers (RR) in the ratio 1:2:1.

Have we heard this recently?  Yes, we now have DNA testing to tell us something that was deduced over 100 years ago.

The rating used is the career rating (3yo+) and is the top of (xxxx, xxxx, xxxx, xxxx)

1) There is a very, very strong relationship between filly runner ratings and their dam's rating

2) There is a strong relationship between colt runner ratings and their dam's rating

3) The relationship between colt runner ratings and their sire ratings are strong, just not as strong

This is an exercise with ratings up to about 2015, but many of the ratings used are decades old.

If you post the above data into Excel and do /Data/Text to Columns/Delimited and use x as a field separator you should get 12 columns of data showing horse ratings in bands (e.g. 01-04; 05-09; 10-14 all the way up to 125-129; 130+).

You will see a very strong relationship between the dam rating and the foal rating, the higher the dam rating the higher the foal rating.

But there is a lot of variation.  The data sample is large to even out these variations.

Sample was 340,283 horses, but only 139,223 had both a foal, sire, dam rating so the table above is for 139,223 rated runners i.e. 201,060 did not have the three ratings "foal, its sire, its dam" for various reasons e.g. many dams are unraced, or raced in a country where it is difficult to get ratings.

Her son (x St Alwyne)  Night Watch won the 1918 Melbourne Cup.  

Another son Blairgour (x Wallace) won the 1911 Oakleigh Plate and Futurity Stakes double.  

Another son Baverstock (x Maltster only won one race but sired the grand stayer David. 

One factor that always fouls the figures is that champion race mares generally get to meet the best sires which would greatly improve their chances of throwing a good winner.  More routine race mares don't have the same advantage. 

( Wallace and Maltster were both champion racehorses and sires.  St Alwyne was a well bred English stallion who was also sire of 1929 Melbourne Cup winner Poitrel and the champion mare Lady Medallist )

He took the broodmare of the year from around 1987 - 1996 for the USA, UK, Australia and NZ ( the time period varied slightly for each country) and he analysed the pedigrees of their progeny to try to find features that explained why they were good race horses.

(NB this was a time when Clive was into looking quite deeply or way back in the pedigrees).

Worth reading if you can get a copy.

Thanks Kav, I thought that may be the case but then I thought he may have calculated his own formula for such a thing.

I sent you a message.

Bumping this -- there are so few Gr-1 races and so few opportunities relative to good racehorses that it's impossible to separate statistical signal from noise.  On top of that, mares have relatively few chances to produce a champion anyway, and all it takes is one bad day in the paddock for a mare's best progeny so far to never race (Zenyatta's War Front filly comes to mind).  

All it takes is one superstar to eliminate any chance a well-bred filly has of being a Gr-1 winner, or her foals being Gr-1 winners.  Sister Madly is a good example...she clearly had Gr-1 talent, she just kept running into More Joyous.  Beaded didn't get her Gr-1 win until Black Caviar retired.  But for Sunline, Zaroyale and Gentle Genius would have been a Gr-1 winners.

Manto hails from the Bruce Lowe family #18 by stud book records. It has a few errors in it, and an interesting story I can share here....

By in large, by mitchondrial sequencing, the family is well conserved, with most of the ancestry tracing to the same haplotype L2b1. This is the same mtDNA haplotype as a branch of the 5 family (Politeness, etc), almost all of the 14 family (that itself is pretty well conserved) and also a branch of the 2-d, where there is a more modern error. All these "families" actually trace back to one mare, that pre-dates stud book entries (this is why anyone using Lowe numbers to breed or classify the thoroughbred is wasting their time...heaps of these "families" are from the same mare in reality).

Manto, or at least her ancestry is actually an error herself. While most of the #18 family is L2b1, we have six samples from that branch, that all trace to Flora McIvor (1828) where we suspect an error has occured. We have mtDNA samples from: 

Miss Admiration - tail female to Flora McIvor via her daughter Waimea (1857) through daughter Raupo

A Real Princess - tail female to Waimea via a different daughter in Wai-iti

Loving Gaby - tail female to Flora McIvor via a different daughter in Io (1855)

Angel Gift - tail female to Io via a different daughter than Loving Gaby is.

These are all the N2 haplotype, not the L2b1 haplotype like the rest of the #18 family.

But here is the mystery.....we have 5 samples from the "Belle" family. All 5 of these are L2b1 haplotype...

If you look at the record of Flora McIvor, she was exported to New Zealand in 1854. All her lineage after that (e.g offspring that trace to daughters of her born after export in 1854) are N2 haplotype. The exception is ironically the "Belle Family" that is L2b1, but that traces back to Emily (1840) a filly out of Flora McIvor that was born before her dam's export to New Zealand. Our suspicion of course is that the wrong mare got on the boat to New Zealand. What we can certainly say from mtDNA is that the Flora McIvor that arrived in NZ in 1854, isnt the Flora McIvor that foaled Emily in 1840.