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Another great milestone in his career, to which there's been many highlights.

Coolmore National Hunt stallion Mahler, who was twice champion point-to-point sire in Ireland, has died at the age of 21. “Mahler had a wonderful temperament and was a lovely horse to be around,” said Robert McCarthy of The Beeches Stud – home to the second-crop son of Galileo since his first season at stud in 2009 – in a statement issued by Coolmore on Saturday. “He has been a great servant over the years and will be sadly missed by everyone here at The Beeches, in particular by Yann, who has looked after him so well for the past few years and is absolutely heartbroken.” Bred by Pegasus Racing Ltd, Mahler developed into a smart stayer for Aidan O'Brien and the Coolmore partners after being bought for 140,000gns at the Tattersalls October Yearling Sale, notably winning the G3 Queen's Vase at Royal Ascot, before finishing second in the G1 St Leger at Doncaster and third in the G1 Melbourne Cup at Flemington. At stud, Mahler is perhaps best known as the sire of Grade 1-winning chasers such as The Real Whacker (Brown Advisory Novices' Chase) and Ornua (Maghull Novices' Chase), in addition to the multiple Grade 2 scorer Chris's Dream and the winner of this year's Fulke Walwyn Kim Muir Challenge Cup at the Cheltenham Festival, Daily Present. The statement added, “Mahler leaves behind a legacy that will be felt for many years in the National Hunt sphere.” The post Leading National Hunt Sire Mahler Dies at The Beeches Stud at 21 appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions. View the full article

Invincible Ibis confirmed his standing as the Classic Mile’s leading contender when the emerging four-year-old delivered Mark Newnham his 100th Hong Kong victory at Sha Tin on Saturday. Stepping up to the Classic Mile trip for the first time in the Class Three Poinsettia Handicap, Invincible Ibis sliced his way through the field under a sublime Zac Purton ride to complete a hat-trick with another dominant triumph. Newnham has compared the Hellbent gelding to his Classic Mile winner of last year,...View the full article

Caspar Fownes took home another feature race when Sky Trust resumed his improvement with a dominant performance to win the Class Two Ivy Handicap (1,200m) at Sha Tin on Saturday. Fownes’ So You Think galloper returned this campaign with a three-length success on wet going and was slapped with a 10lb rise as a result, but he ran with credit in two subsequent runs before returning to the winners’ enclosure in impressive fashion. One-out and one-back under French jockey Maxime Guyon, the pair...View the full article

That’s before my time. It’s not all bad these days. I’ll bet you couldn’t have a bet on a race from Las Piedras Uruguay or Izmir Turkey back then. 

New Zealand-bred gelding Step Aside (NZ) (Redwood) took his earnings to the brink of half a million dollars with a well-timed finish in Saturday’s A$160,000 Petaluma Handicap (1300m) at Randwick. Originally purchased for just $2,300 on Gavelhouse.com, the Chris Waller-trained son of Redwood has now won six races in his 26-start career, backed up by five second placings and four thirds. The six-year-old has earned A$480,400 for his OTI Racing ownership syndicate. Step Aside is proving to be particularly effective at the 1300m distance. Saturday’s race was his 11th attempt at the trip, over which he has now recorded four wins and three placings. Off the scene since an unplaced finish at Rosehill in July, Step Aside resumed with a fourth over 1300m at Rosehill on December 7. He headed to Randwick on Saturday for his second-up assignment at the same distance, where apprentice jockey Siena Grima’s 3kg claim reduced his weight to 58kg. Step Aside drew the second from outside gate, and Grima took him back and settled fourth from last in the early stages of the race. Grima angled him to the outside in the straight and began to move Step Aside through his gears. He drew up alongside Mafia (Written Tycoon), Alabama State (Alabama Express) and Plundering (Shooting To Win) with 100m to run, and finished over the top of them to win by just under a length. OTI Racing took special satisfaction from the win, which capped a Saturday double for New Zealand-breds carrying their navy blue and gold hooped colours. Wymark (NZ) (Savabeel) had previously taken out the A$130,000 Sportsbet Fixed Odds Exotics Handicap (1800m) at Caulfield Heath. “Step Aside continues his ultra-consistent form and makes it a state-to-state double for the OTI colours,” the prominent syndicator said on Facebook. “Step Aside is a tough, reliable performer who keeps delivering when it counts. Congratulations to all connections on another terrific result.” By Redwood out of the winning Roc de Cambes mare Teena Rox (NZ), Step Aside was bought by Cambridge trainer Ralph Manning for $2,300 on Gavelhouse.com in March of 2021. Step Aside won an 800m trial on the Cambridge synthetic track in October of 2022 before his sale to OTI. View the full article

The cliche is that it only takes 40 years to become an overnight success.  Obviously it can never take that long for a horse but Starspangledbanner could be forgiven for thinking something along those lines as he ends 2025 with his status at an all-time high. There were several notable aspects to this year's Cartier Awards, most notably the happy situation that all bar one of the winners will still be in training in 2026. Another stand-out feature was that both the Champion Two-Year-Old Colt (Gstaad) and the Champion Two-Year-Old Filly (Precise) are by the same stallion. A consequence is that their sire Starspangledbanner will start 2026 standing at his highest ever fee (€60,000) at an age (20) at which most stallions have already started to fall out of fashion. This was not the first time that one stallion has been responsible for both Cartier champion juveniles. In 2010 the accolades were taken by Frankel and Misty For Me, son and daughter of Galileo. In 2005 Danehill's offspring George Washington and Rumplestiltskin took the prizes. Starspangledbanner's achievement thus isn't unprecedented, but it does put him into very exalted company. As the time it has taken suggests, it has been a long and winding road for Starspangledbanner to reach his new peak of popularity. The road began promisingly because, born in Australia in September 2006, he was bred by one of the country's most notable breeders: Tony Santic's Emily Kristina Pty Ltd, then riding on the crest of a wave as the owner/breeder of the great mare who had won the past three Melbourne Cups and the most recent Cox Plate, Makybe Diva. She had been retained as a yearling but the young Starspangledbanner was sent to the Inglis Easter Yearling Sale in 2008, where he was bought by up-and-coming syndicator Brad Spicer for $120,000 to join the Victorian stable of Bart Cummings' former foreman Leon Corstens. Spicer had only set up his syndication business in 2005 and Starspangledbanner would go on to become the top-class horse which such an operation needs to establish itself in the elite tier of syndicators, where it remains to this day. There was plenty of class and speed in Starspangledbanner's pedigree and it didn't take him long to start showing it. As a son of the top-class dual-hemisphere pioneer Choisir, he came from the Danehill sire-line, while his dam Gold Anthem had been a fast filly in South Australia. Furthermore, he has Australia's historically greatest influence for class, speed and precocity, Star Kingdom, on both sides of his pedigree (which may or may not be of merely academic interest). The great horse is there in an unusual way on the distaff side. Gold Anthem was a daughter of the US-bred Star Kingdom-line stallion Made Of Gold, who had been a high-class two-year-old in England before retiring to stud in South Australia. Looking farther back, Starspangledbanner descends from the great mare Eulogy, who was exported to New Zealand after a racing career in which she ran against The Tetrarch (in the Champagne Stakes at Doncaster in 1913). An inductee in the New Zealand Hall of Fame as a 'breed-shaper', she can now boast well over 100 Group 1-winning direct descendants. These include two close relations of Starspangledbanner: the top-class half-brothers Elvstroem and Haradasun (whose granddam Olympic Aim was his third dam) who were at the peak of their powers shortly before Starspangledbanner started racing.  Starspangledbanner made his debut in one of the principal two-year-old races of the Spring Carnival in Melbourne in 2008, on the same Moonee Valley card on which Maldivian won the Cox Plate. He won that day before later confirming his position among the leading two-year-olds in Victoria with a midfield finish in the G1 Blue Diamond after finishing third in the G3 Colts' and Geldings' Prelude. It was easy to predict that Starspangledbanner, a big imposing horse in the mould of his magnificent sire Choisir, might improve from two to three. That is exactly what he did, enjoying a magnificent campaign in the spring of 2009, highlighted by his victory in the G1 Caulfield Guineas. In the autumn he doubled his tally of Group 1 victories by taking the Oakleigh Plate before re-confirming his status as a top-class sprinter by finishing third in the G1 Newmarket Handicap, giving weight to both of the horses (Wanted and Eagle Falls) who beat him. With a controlling interest in Starspangledbanner having been sold to the Coolmore triumvirate, his next move was to follow in the footsteps of Choisir by heading to Royal Ascot. Whereas Choisir had come to Europe still under the care of his original trainer Paul Perry, Starspangledbanner was transferred to Aidan O'Brien. He did his new connections proud in Europe with three magnificent Group 1 sprinting performances: wins in the Golden Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot and the July Cup at Newmarket and then second place behind Sole Power in the Nunthorpe Stakes at York. By the end of the year he had achieved the notable double of being recognised as Champion Sprinter in both Australia and Europe. This looked to be a perfect prelude to a successful career as a stallion. However, he had already had one blip in his progress and he was shortly to have another. Starspangledbanner had made a winning reappearance as a spring three-year-old when scoring over 1000m at Caulfield on the first day (ie August 1) of the 2009/'10 season but subsequently was disqualified from that race for returning a race-day swab positive to altrenogest, a synthetic hormone given (under the name Regumate) to broodmares to regulate their reproductive cycles. It transpired that he had been given this in error and, fortunately, the drug was no longer detectable in swabs taken on the days of his subsequent races so he wasn't disqualified from those triumphs (which must have provided some consolation for Corstens while he served the six-month ban which he received for his error). That was the first setback in Starspangledbanner's career. The second came after he had retired to stud when it transpired that only a minority of the mares whom he was covering were getting in foal. It is impossible to know whether this was a consequence of the broodmares' hormone which he had received during his racing career. Whatever the cause, however, one thing was sure: there was a major question mark over his future as a stallion, hence the decision to put him back into training at Ballydoyle in 2012 once it was established that he was again proving sub-fertile in his second season. Resuming racing in the second half of the summer, he achieved relatively little in six runs, notwithstanding that he did finish second in a Group 3 sprint at the Curragh. Step forward Anthony Mithen. The proprietor of Rosemont Stud in Victoria was a minority share-holder in Starspangledbanner, thanks to having been able to buy the holding of the one original part-owner who had remained in him when he was sold to Coolmore. The outlook for Starspangledbanner as a stallion looked bleak but Mithen kept the faith. It was a long and experimental process at Rosemont to try to improve the horse's fertililty but eventually Mithen's efforts began to pay dividends. This was particularly good news because when the few members of his small first crop had started racing as two-year-olds in 2014, two of them won at Royal Ascot: The Wow Signal won the G2 Coventry Stakes (before taking the the G1 Prix Morny two months later) and Anthem Alexander landed the G3 Queen Mary Stakes. Coolmore had given up bringing Starspangledbanner up from Australia for the northern hemisphere seasons so he stayed put at Rosemont in 2013 and '14. However, once Mithen's efforts had started to produce a marked improvement in his fertility, he resumed his journeys north from 2015 onwards. Since then, he has gradually worked his way back to popularity. The 2017 seasons were particularly fruitful as three outstanding horses were conceived in that year, two in Ireland and one in Australia. State Of Rest emulated his father by winning at Group 1 level in both hemispheres. In fact, he scored at the highest level in four countries: in the USA, France and Australia (in the Cox Plate) as a three-year-old in 2021 and in England (at Royal Ascot in the Prince Of Wales's Stakes) at four. Also born in Ireland in 2018 was California Spangle, who headed to Hong Kong after changing hands for €150,000 at the Goffs Orby Sale in 2019. There he won 13 races, most notably defeating Golden Sixty in the G1 Longines HK Mile in December 2022. Earlier in the year he had justified odds-on favouritism in the HK Classic Cup in which his victims included Romantic Warrior. On either side of that victory were close second places behind that horse in the HK Classic Mile and the HK Derby.  Also conceived in 2017 was the Australian-bred gelding Beauty Eternal, winner to date (he is still racing) of nine races in Hong Kong including the G1 FWD Champions Mile in 2024 when the beaten horses included both Voyage Bubble and Golden Sixty as well as three challengers from Japan and one (Brave Emperor) from England. Good deeds don't always receive their due reward but Starspangledbanner's continually expanding record of achievement is, pleasingly, now producing the support and recognition which he deserves. His 2025 season of success has not only seen him hailed as sire of two Cartier Award winners. The autumn's round of yearling sales saw some big prices paid for his stock, headed by Godolphin paying the highest price yet achieved by a Starspangledbanner yearling (900,000gns). This sum was given for Islanmore Stud's daughter of the Galileo mare Love Potion in Book 2 of Tattersalls' October Sale, a month after the filly's full-brother Avicenna had maintained his unbeaten record by taking the Flying Scotsman Stakes at Doncaster. Furthermore, what could be viewed as the icing on the cake came during the December Sale when MV Magnier paid 4,500,000gns for the four-time Group 1-winning Cartier 2024 Champion Three-Year-Old Filly Porta Fortuna and announced afterwards that she is likely to be covered by Starspangledbanner during the forthcoming season. About to turn 20 he may be, but some of Starspangledbanner's best days might still be in front of him.   The post Best Days Still Ahead for Evergreen Starspangledbanner appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions. View the full article

My answer to the question is YES.

Used to like oncourse exchange trebles / doubles. Always at Addington after a close finish…. pop down to view photo finish pic beside old main stand.    Only went to races couple of times for Jackpots, the buzz around course was amazing, not sure of they were exchange as well? No doubt somebody will have some good stories about them, anyone get one up?