Irish Hopes Riding On Mendelssohn

[Wandering Eyes]

When the starting gates crash open for Kentucky Derby 144 on Saturday evening, Irish eyes will be locked on Mendelssohn (Scat Daddy) as he bids to provide Aidan O’Brien, Ryan Moore and team Coolmore with a historic result in America’s greatest race.

Mendelssohn’s Run for the Roses on the surface appears a project about two years in the making for Coolmore-they parted with $3-million to take ownership of him at Keeneland September in 2016-but the foundations of the plan run far deeper, and in fact don’t stray too far from their origins.

In 1975, studmaster John Magnier, businessman Robert Sangster and a certain master trainer by the name O’Brien (sound familiar?) spearheaded a revolutionary sales strategy of buying “baby stallions”-but not just any baby stallions: those, specifically, by the emerging supersire Northern Dancer, whom Vincent O’Brien had identified as a potential breed-shaper early on due to his extreme toughness on the track: 18 starts all in the top three, including 14 wins and nine 2-year-old starts.

“We must buy the Northern Dancers,” O’Brien was quoted as saying in Patrick Robinson’s bestselling Horsetrader. “We must buy them at all costs. And the same goes for yearlings by Nijinsky. I am telling you. We must have them. I am very certain of that.”

The results of the scheme are now nothing short of legendary, the effects still reverberating through sales rings, across racecourses and over the industry as a whole globally, both through the genetic influence of the baby stallions themselves and the bloodstock boom the strategy spurred. Sons of Northern Dancer purchased in the U.S. and trained in Europe by the founding lads included The Minstrel, Storm Bird and Lomond, while Caerleon and Royal Academy were sired by O’Brien’s Triple Crown-winning son of Northern Dancer, Nijinsky. Other breed shapers that followed the same transatlantic path, but were homebred in the U.S., included Northern Dancer sons El Gran Senor and, of course, the great Sadler’s Wells.

Come the turn of the 21st century, there is a new triumvirate at the helm of Coolmore and a new master O’Brien in charge at Ballydoyle, but the fires ignited by those chosen baby stallions have not dimmed in the slightest. Sadler’s Wells leads the pack, represented by a perennial parade of Classic and Group 1 winners in Europe largely thanks to his flagbearing sons Galileo and Montjeu. El Gran Senor, for his part, is the damsire of Empire Maker, the sire of two sires of Kentucky Derby winners. A daughter of Lomond produced that good dual hemisphere sire Exceed and Excel. Caerleon was a largely influential sire and broodmare sire, his progeny headed by the Derby winner Generous and the Arc victor Marienbard.

Storm Bird was repatriated at the end of his racing career to stand at Coolmore’s Ashford Stud in Kentucky and left an indelible mark on the breed, namely through his champion sire son Storm Cat but also as the damsire of Thunder Gulch, who provided current Coolmore partner Michael Tabor with a win in the Kentucky Derby in 1995 and who died this year as a pensioner at Ashford.

Storm Cat’s line is well and truly safe, his flagbearers at stud including Coolmore’s late homebred Giant’s Causeway–who followed his grandsire’s path as an American-bred trained in Europe and repatriated before becoming a champion sire who is leaving a dynasty of his own-and so many others. Another branch of the Storm Cat dynasty is Scat Daddy, a great grandson, and that is where the story once again comes full circle, at least as far as Mendelssohn is concerned.

When it comes to baby stallions, Mendelssohn could have hardly fit the bill better, being a half-brother to rising young American sire Into Mischief, and not to mention that nine-time Grade I-winning mare Beholder. By the time Mendelssohn reached the ring at Keeneland in 2016, Scat Daddy’s progeny were at a premium; the stallion, who had been purchased by Coolmore to stand at stud, had died the previous December at just 11 years old at the height of his success, and as such the opportunities were suddenly few to hoard pieces of his legacy.

And so there were the lads–some faces new but the strategy still largely the same–back in that Keeneland ring where they first set the Thoroughbred world alight some 41 years ago. The final pricetag on Mendelssohn was an eye-watering $3-million, and one has to imagine they weren’t leaving without the horse that day.

Mendelssohn followed that consecrated path back to Ballydoyle well-trodden by his esteemed predecessors, and while he didn’t pack in as many 2-year-old outings as his great, great, great, great grandsire Northern Dancer did, one has to imagine the late Vincent O’Brien would be smiling at a 2-year-old able to cap off a juvenile campaign racing in three countries with a win at the Breeders’ Cup. Scat Daddy, for his part, has held up his end of the bargain, continuing to churn out Group 1 winners and supplying four of the 20 runners in this year’s Derby.

This week, Mendelssohn is back in his home state via Dubai, and win or lose on Saturday it is not hard to imagine him continuing to follow in the hallowed hoofprints of those before him and shaping into a breed-changing sire.

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