MM 2026

Athletic goer. Very nice horse. May have made more in book1

Must have been smallish on inspection but has absolutely thrived  thru spring & a prep

ps we once lived next door to Adrian Corboy's brother, a very good farrier. They have about 16 children between them and God knows how many more their siblings have also produced.  All home-schooled as I understand it.

Just hope it prints.

I have a couple of programs developed for my own use, one analyses six-generation pedogrees, the other ten-generation pedigrees.

If you can analyse one pedigree it is a short step to have a load file with thousands of pedigrees and a results file to accept the analysis of those pedigrees.

A few people ask for suggestions and I give my picks.

In November I was asked by a person in California to suggest a CA sire for a mare. I analysed the mare with all USA sires and listed a handful of what I thought would suit the mare. One CA sire that was under consideration by the mare owner was in my suggestions so it gave them more confidence.

On 31st December an Australian sent me a list of nine Karaka yearlings and asked my opinion. I like to work from the biggest possible list and discard. I analysed all the 1,030 (?) Karaka yearlings and was interested in 17. After looking at the pedigrees in more detail I sent a short list of six with six second choices. The info was passed to a trainer who bought one that was on both our lists.

I find pedigrees of horses offered at the sales are not well put together.

If I want to breed a foal I start without a mare and without a sire. 

I live in Ireland. I gather Excel files from the three main breeding stock sales in Europe (IRE; GB; FR) and complete the mare pedigrees to five generations (and that automatically gives me ten or more generations.)

Then I prepare pedigrees of all the sires at stud in Europe, about 500. This is more difficult as new sires go to stud, and other sires leave.

What I am looking for is the biggest possible sample of sire and dam combinations.

I December 2023 I compared 2,308 European mares on offer with 497 sires at stud, or 1,147,076 "foals" / test-matings, 2,308 x 497).

My program counts colt factors and filly factors.

See Clive Harper's 1997 book, The Thoroughbred Breeders' Handbook, or read foalmare.com for a list of these factors.

I want as many factors as possible in the foal (the maximum is 8). 

We do not know the sex of the foal in advance so try to plan a pedigree that will produce a useful horse of either sex i.e with as many colt factors and as many filly factors as possible.

I discard many horses (pedigrees) with this ready reckoner method, and obviously throw out many that could be good.

When I have what I consider the better pedigrees I look at each on screen in TesioPower in great detail. These might be less than one tenth of one percent of the original sample.

At this stage I look at the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th 11th 12th generations, comparing the sire side with the dam side of the "foal".

There are weaknesses with this method.

Many good horses do not have good matching in the first six generations e.g. Via Sistina, but have matching elsewhere, often the sire and dam dam lines.

Over the last 50 years with fewer stallions a stud serving bigger books good pedigrees are becoming rare. The result imo is more slow horses.

This trend might appear to be a negative but I look on it as a positive if you can analyse pedigrees.

You can breed a better horse (although it is very difficult), and you can avoid the good looking, good conformation slow horses offered at the sales.

In future I will try to add in a comparison of the dams on the sire line with the dams on the dam line as I believe good horses can have links here, often but not always the 4th dam of the sire and the 4th dam of the dam.

My analysis is an inbreeding analysis (I prefer the term duplications.)

Very little dam racing ability is inherited in her foal. My work says about 25% of the figure above the industry average of about 70 i.e. a dam rated 110 tends to have foals rated 80 [70+25% of (110-70)]. Professor Patrick Cunningham estimated it at 35%.  Either way foals do not inherit black type.

The best predictor of success in a foal (my opinion) is full siblings in its sire and dam in the 4th, 5th or 6th generation (4th and 5th best). Better still if they are full sibling sister and brother. Better again if the sex of the offspring of the full siblings is the opposite sex to the full sibling i.e. a female FS producing a son, a male FS producing a daughter. Better again if there are more than two full siblings in the six generations.

Commentators say the great breeder Federici Tesio never revealed the secrets of his success, yet in his book Breeding The Racehorse, Chapter 6, Breeding For Speed, he gives three requirements: inbreeding; nicks (which is inbreeding); the best quality parents. Then Tesio spends a few pages talking about full sibling brothers and sisters - and people say he revealed nothing.

I have hijacked the thread a bit but thought people like might to know what I do as a hobby. 

I bred this one, Saint Eligius.

His rating is slightly above average and hopefully he runs again in France this year.