‘Catalina’ A New Bruiser for Union Rags

[Wandering Eyes]

Sleeping giants don’t tend to stay in bed quite as long as this. But then they are seldom built on quite such a gargantuan scale, either.

At 1,250 lbs, Catalina Cruiser (Union Rags) is lucky that Californian cliff swallows have not started nesting on his shoulders. As it is, the craggy 4-year-old was able to swat away his pursuers in a breakout performance at Del Mar last weekend, barreling 6 3/4 lengths clear in the G2 San Diego Handicap.

This was only his third race, following a solitary start last year and an allowance sprint in May, and his first at stakes level. But his next appearance will be in the elite tier and, with older horses very much back in play for the Breeders’ Cup Classic now that Justify (Scat Daddy) is in dry dock, Catalina Cruiser certainly appears to have the raw ability to freshen up the division.

We still have the possibility, of course, of slow-burning 3-year-olds also coming through just as the wheels come loose on those who toughed out the Triple Crown trail–after the model of the last two Travers winners, Arrogate (Unbridled’s Song) and West Coast (Flatter).

The former was foaled on April 11, the latter on May 14. Now the fact is that fine pasture and weather have often made precocious achievers of relatively late arrivals. But Catalina Cruiser, an April 27 foal, represents the very opposite of the spectrum from, say, the compact Northern Dancer (May 27). This hulking animal has evidently had to overcome various growing pains; and even now trainer John Sadler appears anxious to space his races apart, such is the sheer power he devotes to running fast.

Now that he is blossoming, however, Catalina Cruiser turns a welcome new page for his sire.

Union Rags was the most expensive new stallion of 2013, having retired to Lane’s End at $35,000. His first runner won by five lengths and he has scarcely looked back since, maintaining a six-figure yearling average throughout and meanwhile elevating his fee to $60,000.

His debut crop has already produced three individual Grade I winners, and Catalina Cruiser looks highly eligible to become a fourth. Even as it stands, the addition of Free Drop Billy–his first male Grade I scorer, as a 2-year-old last fall–qualifies Union Rags to join only Galileo (Ire) (Sadler’s Wells) and Giant’s Causeway (Storm Cat), among modern sires, in mustering four elite winners from his first two seasons with runners on the track.

No other sire in his intake has so far managed more than one, albeit in doing so Bodemeister (Empire Maker), Maclean’s Music (Distorted Humor) and Tapizar (Tapit) have respectively sired winners of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Kentucky Oaks; while on some measures they are all being outdone by Creative Cause (Giant’s Causeway), class leader for the 2018 campaign to date. Throw champion freshman Dialed In (Mineshaft) into the mix, and you are looking at some pretty outrageous competition when it comes to consolidating early gains.

Yet Union Rags, besides his freakish Grade I haul, also remains top of this group by an overall seven GSW and 11 GSH. Catalina Cruiser is admittedly his first black type winner this year, after a series a near-misses. As such, however, his emergence as “the next big thing” for Hronis Racing offers priceless ballast to steady the ship pending those boosts–in both the quality and quantity of his mares–Union Rags earned by his flying start.

His latest foals, for instance, were conceived at a fee hoisted last year to $50,000, when his book expanded from 123 to 160. (In contrast, he only has 86 yearlings to follow through a juvenile crop of 107 for this year.)

If Catalina Cruiser–a $370,000 Keeneland September yearling–represents a timely break for his sire, he is one very well earned by the team at Lane’s End.

He was bred there, for one thing, in support of a new recruit whose sire Dixie Union and grandsire Dixieland Band had both preceded him on the Farish farm. Catalina Cruiser’s dam Sea Gull, moreover, is by Lane’s End stalwart Mineshaft (A.P. Indy) and was acquired by its owner W.S. Farish for $230,000 as a yearling at the Saratoga Select Sale in 2007.

A turf winner at three and four, Sea Gull has already produced–from three other starters–a useful animal in Grade III scorer Eagle (Candy Ride {Arg})–beaten half a length in the GI Stephen Foster H. and just starting out at stud in Texas.

Pairing Sea Gull with Union Rags enabled Lane’s End to replicate several iconic influences of the modern breed: Northern Dancer, Mr Prospector, Seattle Slew and Secretariat all appear on both sides of Catalina Cruiser’s pedigree, in either the fourth or fifth generation. On the other hand, in both sire and dam the bottom line reaches down to one or two seams of invigorating diversity.

Sea Gull is out of a Storm Bird mare–an exceptional sire-line, of course, in distaff terms-whose own dam was half-sister to Magical Wonder (winner of the G1 Prix Jean Prat and himself by Storm Bird) and Mt Livermore (sire of six champions). Their mother, herself Grade I-placed, was by Crimson Satan. That tough and prolific campaigner of the early 1960s already had a conspicuous female legacy through his blazingly fast daughter Crimson Saint, the dam of Royal Academy and grand-dam of Storm Cat.

The family of Union Rags himself, meanwhile, should be so resonant in Europe that–much like his Lane’s End companion Quality Road (Elusive Quality)–he surely merits transatlantic attention, despite his own excellence on dirt.

He is, for instance, a half-brother to the dam of the young Ashford sire Declaration Of War (War Front), who proved equally accomplished on turf and dirt. And their mother Tempo (Gone West), who won two of only three starts, is in turn out of a rugged dual GSW over a long stretch of lawn in Terpsichorist (Nijinsky).

The latter was a full-sister to Gorytus (Nijinsky)–a name that still sends shivers down the spine, having looked a champion in the making as a youngster, in England back in 1982, before derailing in such notorious fashion that some were adamant he had been doped. (Others suspected a more fundamental failure, specifically of interest, in the horse himself.)

Crowning this turf background is the dam of Terpsichorist and Gorytus: Glad Rags, whose sire High Hat who ran fourth in the Arc in the colours of Sir Winston Churchill. Glad Rags won the 1,000 Guineas in 1966 for Alice du Pont Mills, who had bought her as a yearling for 6,800gns from Captain Tim Rogers.

It was that charismatic lady’s daughter Phyllis Wyeth who famously bred and sold Union Rags before waking her husband in the middle of the night and announcing that she had just had a dream and needed to buy Tempo’s last colt back. Having sold him at Saratoga for $145,000, Wyeth went to $390,000 to retrieve this precious scion of the Glad Rags family at a breeze-up sale in Florida the following spring.

She had been working for President Kennedy in the White House (so ensuring a cut to her allowance, her father having run Nixon’s campaign in Virginia) when a car accident in 1962 permanently restricted her mobility. But if a young idealist had to endure violent awakenings from the hopes of the time, both personal and political, then at least the dream Wyeth had nearly half a century later–regarding Tempo’s colt–proved a happily prophetic one.

Despite the strapping build he has passed on (along with a cheerful blaze) to Catalina Cruiser, Union Rags proved far more precocious for Michael Matz in 2011. After romping the GII Saratoga Special by seven lengths, and the GI Champagne by five, he started hot favourite for the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. Though he just failed to reel in Hansen (Tapit) that day, he was able to climax a somewhat mixed sophomore campaign with success in the Belmont.

Unfortunately, he was then sidelined by injury. But as a Grade I winner at two and a Classic winner at three, with a flashy physique and monster stride, Union Rags already looked the outstanding heir to his sire Dixie Union–a reliable source of imposing yearlings until his premature loss, aged 13, in 2010.

Dixie Union was a Norfolk, Haskell and Malibu winner whose third dam was half-sister to the matriarch Fall Aspen. But if that gave him an automatic local market, the sire-line also compounds the European appeal of his son. For while this branch of the Northern Dancer dynasty nowadays represents something of an outcross for dominant turf lines, Dixieland Band himself had a good record in Europe: his stock ranging from several winners of juvenile Group sprints to a dual Ascot Gold Cup winner.

But the bottom line is that power, constitution and class should work in every environment. Union Rags is not the first Belmont winner in the clan, after all: Glad Rags occupies exactly the same position in the family tree of Colonial Affair (Pleasant Colony). Interestingly, Nijinsky also recurs as sire of dam (in the case of Colonial Affair) and second dam (in that of Union Rags) respectively.

And it is not hard to see something of the brawn and reach of Nijinsky in the imposing stamp of the 16.3hh Union Rags. Wherever he rolls from here, then, this equine boulder Catalina Cruiser is certainly hewn from mighty rock.

 

View the full article