Cause for Excitement at Airdrie

[Wandering Eyes]

It was a daunting group of young sires to be measured against. Last year, two of them won Triple Crown races at the first attempt, through Always Dreaming (Bodemeister) and Cloud Computing (Maclean’s Music). From his second crop, another has since come up with a Kentucky Oaks winner in Monomoy Girl (Tapizar), while Paradise Woods and company have already hoisted Union Rags (Dixie Union) up from $35,000 to $60,000. And that’s without even mentioning the intake’s champion freshman, Dialed In (Mineshaft), who has rightly quadrupled his own, very modest starting fee.

Halfway through their third season, however, all these fast starters find themselves panting in the wake of a stallion who is leading the way by prize money, black-type winners and graded stakes winners. Against those operating from meaningful book sizes, moreover, he is also first by winners-to-starters.

His name is Creative Cause (Giant’s Causeway) and he has now sealed his emergence with a first Grade I winner in Pavel–whose breakout success in the Stephen Foster H. earlier this month provides an encouraging template, in terms of building on initial foundations, for his sire’s stock overall.

Not that Creative Cause has exactly been a slow burn. Seven Black Type winners last year put the Airdrie stallion alongside Dialed In, Maclean’s Music and Union Rags atop the second-season sires, while as a rookie in 2016 he had managed a strike-rate of one-in-three with his first juveniles. (Starting with his very first runner, at Los Alamitos in April over just 4 1/2 furlongs).

Creative Cause was himself a Grade I winner at two who disappeared after making his tenth start in the GI Preakness S. But if his progeny can match his own precocity and dash with a propensity to keep thriving, then he seems bound to keep elbowing his way forward in the contest to become the premier Kentucky heir to Giant’s Causeway, who died in April.

“We knew, coming in, that it was going to be very difficult in such an exceptional crop of first-year sires,” recalled Airdrie’s Bret Jones. “But what we’re seeing right now with Creative Cause is what we’ve been lucky enough to see in the past with our other big stallions. And that’s to find, every Saturday, that you’ve another couple of Creative Causes running in stakes. It’s been snowballing that way for the last year or so now.

“What’s very encouraging is that his horses stay at a high level. Pavel seems like he’s been around a long time already, running against the best around. But not only do they stay together, and have that soundness-they also seem to get better. Pavel is now a Grade I winner. And that’s very much the way Giant’s Causeway earned his reputation.”

These are exciting times at a farm where owners Brereton and Elizabeth Jones have assembled a highly regarded young team to supervise a corresponding roster of sires, not least sales phenomenon Cairo Prince (Pioneerof The Nile).

Creative Cause was enlisted in 2012 after his smouldering presence on the Triple Crown trail had been finally doused with third place in the Preakness.

A $135,000 Keeneland September yearling pinhook, the roan-grey had missed his intended sale at two and was instead acquired privately by trainer Mike Harrington on behalf of ski resort developer Heinz Steinmann.

That year he won a Hollywood Park maiden by daylight, the GII Best Pal S. (beating I’ll Have Another (Flower Alley)) and the GI Norfolk S., before going down by barely a length when third in the GI Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. At three, he beat Bodemeister (Empire Maker) in the GII San Felipe S., before finishing off with three consecutive defeats by old rival I’ll Have Another: by a nose in the GI Santa Anita Derby; by three lengths when fifth in the Kentucky Derby, his only career start off the board; and by nine lengths in the Preakness.

If now “the bloom was a little bit off the rose,” as Jones put it, at least that brought a deal within reach for Airdrie.

“On the Pimlico backside the atmosphere is more laidback [than Churchill],” said Jones. “Yes, there are still cameras and all the rest of it, but there’s a bit more time. And I’ll never forget seeing him come out of the barn one morning and just stand there like a statue. He had so much class; that special kind of look. And that was the moment we decided we wanted to pursue him full-bore.

“We really put some pressure on ourselves, because we felt we were bringing home the best stud prospect we have ever had here. We’ve always been a bit of a niche operation: stallions in the $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 range. And when you bring one in, at that level, sometimes you have to forgive something here or forgive something there. But with this horse, we saw no deficiencies. He had that pedigree, he had that brilliance, and he had that conformation. All we had to do was not screw it up!”

Airdrie duly committed to supporting Creative Cause with the best mares on the farm. Jones is full of praise for the Steinmann family, with whom the farm is enjoying “as good a partnership as you could ask for.” With everyone putting a shoulder to the wheel, Creative Cause opened with books of 118, 122 and 103; and then covered 125 mares in 2016 after his first yearlings, conceived at $15,000, raised an average of $67,405.

While he dipped to 96 mares last year, his direction of travel now can be judged from a fee hike to $20,000 this spring. And he duly covered his biggest book to date, at 145 mares.

“His sales have always been solid,” Jones reflects. “But there were a few we felt didn’t bring quite what they should. We’d always been told that a little bit of a shorter walk was a Giant’s Causeway trait, but no matter how nice and balanced the body and movement, we couldn’t convince everybody of that. Pavel, for instance, didn’t have that sexy overstep a lot of buyers like to see. So it’s been very fulfilling that a lot of the horses we thought a little undervalued have now gone out there and got it done in the afternoon.”

However much Giant’s Causeway can be seen in Creative Cause, then let’s not leave the bottom half of his family tree out of the equation. Because it provides a fascinating foil and, in its less familiar reaches, may be contributing rather more than supposed.

On the face of it, Creative Cause testifies to the capacity of a mare who apparently outran her own genes to replicate her track ability with the help of an elite sire like Giant’s Causeway. For his dam Dream Of Summer (Siberian Summer), though herself a Grade I winner and millionaire, belongs to a family of small distinction.

So much so, in fact, that her breeder Jim Weigel had been able to buy Dream Of Summer’s unraced dam Mary’s Dream (Skywalker) for just $7,000. And that, in turn, is exactly where the bidding stalled when, offering her as a yearling, he set a $10,000 reserve on the filly Mary’s Dream had delivered to Siberian Summer in 1999.

Weigel kept her to race himself, naming her Dream Of Summer, but still had to be patient as various setbacks kept her off the track until she was four. But she then missed the board in only three of 20 starts, winning the GI Apple Blossom S. among five other stakes.

Dream Of Summer represented seven generations of hard-running Cal-breds, featuring only a smattering of regional stakes winners. But it would be wrong to be at all supercilious about that lineage.

Her dam Mary’s Dream was out of a useful filly who forged together two different forms of West Coast ore: the hallmark Old English Rancho speed of her mother (who also produced a Grade II winner on turf), and the ruggedness of a GI San Juan Capistrano Handicap winner in Properantes, the best son of Protanto.

Protanto! I do like turning up a horse like this in a pedigree. The 1971 Whitney winner was out of a half-sister to none other than Bold Ruler. As a son of Native Dancer, Protanto was inbred 3×3 to one of the great broodmare sires in Discovery, responsible for the dams of both Bold Ruler and Native Dancer.

Protanto died young, and Properantes was just about all he mustered from a stud career alongside a horse named Northern Dancer at Windfields in Maryland. Properantes, for his part, was given a chance at Old English, but turf stayers can go hungry at stud out in California. Pretty neat, then, that his name should now have been restored from oblivion by a hot young sire.

Perhaps none of this particularly accounts for a single hair in the tail of Creative Cause. On the other hand, something has to explain why a fairly threadbare Californian family was able to pan a nugget of gold like Dream Of Summer.

She was the best of just 13 stakes winners mustered by Siberian Summer, who had shocked Bertrando (Skywalker) in the 1993 GI Strub S. But he doubtless paid for a chequered start to his stud career, twice moved on after colourful disputes between his owner and host farms. By the time Siberian Summer died, the week before Creative Cause won the Best Pal S., few remembered his connection to one of the most regal families in Europe.

But his half-sister is Magnificient Style (Silver Hawk), dam of seven stakes winners including Nathaniel (Ire) (Galileo {Ire}), sire of European champion Enable (GB) from his first crop; G1 Irish Oaks winner Great Heavens (GB) (Galileo {Ire}); and record-breaking $10.5-million broodmare buy, Playful Act.

The mare who produced both Siberian Summer and Magnificient Style was Mia Karina (Icecapade). And her grand-dam Delta (Nasrullah {GB}) was one of two daughters of the famous Bourtai (Stimulus) to be named Broodmare of the Year.

One way or another, then, there is rather more to Creative Cause’s family than meets the eye. A second meeting of his parents, after all, also paid off in the shape of Destin, who won the GII Tampa Bay Derby before finishing second, beaten a nose, in the GI Belmont S. two years ago.

“Though Creative Cause was himself precocious, we never for one second thought of him as a source of ‘cheap speed’,” emphasized Jones. “He has that classic profile: not just Giant’s Causeway, but a dam who kept getting better and better with age, and beat Ashado (Saint Ballado) in a Grade I as an older mare. But another thing that really drew us to him was that so many different sire-lines can breed to this horse.”

Jones is proud that several of those making a name for Creative Cause were bred and raised at Airdrie. Pavel himself was a shared project with WinStar, while My Boy Jack and Significant Form, both GSW, were bred by Brereton C. Jones. The former, a $20,000 Keeneland September bargain, ran fifth in the Kentucky Derby; while the latter, who turned a $500,000 pinhook profit at the breeze-ups, ran fourth in the GI Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Filly Turf. Both are slated for Grade I starts at Belmont July 7.

American conduits for the class, toughness and versatility of Giant’s Causeway are in increasing competition. First Samurai has perhaps set the pace to this point, but Fed Biz is now getting started while other exciting young sires in his slipstream include Carpe Diem and Not This Time. Like Creative Cause, none of them is extravagantly priced. But any that proves equal to their great legacy could potentially break right into the Kentucky elite.

With that in mind, Creative Cause appears to be on a highly promising curve.

“I have to admit he’s always the first one I go to in the barn, and that I always have three or four peppermints in my pocket for him,” Jones said. “There’s just something about him that draws you to him. He’s definitely got the ‘it’ factor.”

 

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