Rowe On Monday - End of the Galileo era, fast HK starts for Aussies and Kiwis and a Bangkok musical tribute for Chester

In this week’s Rowe On Monday, Tim reflects on the influence of Galileo after his final Classic runner, Jamie Richards and Deep Field off to a flyer in Hong Kong and a shining star in Thailand commemorated in song.

Stay True may not have won the St Leger Stakes at Doncaster in England at the weekend, the Group 1 three-year-old race belonged to his stablemate Scandinavia, but his placing was also a piece of history nonetheless.

By champion sire Galileo, the Aidan O’Brien-trained Stay True is from the last crop of the breed-shaping son of Sadler’s Wells and he is the last three-year-old by the Coolmore stallion to contest a Classic race in Britain.

The Galileo era is coming to an end. He has sired 386 stakes winners, 27 of them bred in the southern hemisphere across five consecutive seasons shuttling to Australia from 2002 to 2006.

Standing at Coolmore’s Jerrys Plains stud, Galileo covered 720 mares, siring 565 southern hemisphere-bred foals for 434 runners.

Of those 27 stakes winners, five were Group 1 winners, including Stradbroke winner Linton and Sydney Cup winner Niwot and Sousa, the 2008 Spring Champion Stakes winner. Galileo had a stakes winners to runners ratio of 6.22 per cent in the southern hemisphere.

Despite more than commendable results on the racetrack and in the sales ring - Galileo’s Australian-bred yearlings averaged $132,697 in his last crop, only $1100 less than his first crop Jerrys Plains conceived progeny - commercial reality set in and it made it unviable for him to keep shuttling given the rise of his fortunes in Europe.

“I tell the lads I was struggling to sell noms to him and I think you’ve got to say that the horse did an unbelievable job here with his Australian-bred crops,” Coolmore’s Colm Santry told this column.

“But Australia’s race programming is not for a stallion like Galileo and possibly even Frankel and Sea The Stars and all these great stallions of the world.

“In races like the Spring Champion Stakes in Sydney, the Cox Plates, the Caulfield Cups, the Melbourne Cup, those middle distance races … there’s a very small window for those stallions to make a name for themselves and he certainly did in a big way.”

Galileo was champion European sire on 12 occasions, proving a powerhouse for Coolmore, just as Dubawi has for international rival Godolphin.

And at Leopardstown, less than three hours after Justify’s Melbourne Cup entrant Scandinavia won at Doncaster, it was Dubawi colt Delacroix who won the Irish Champions Stakes, his second Group 1 win in an 11-start career.

O’Brien intimated that it could be Delacroix’s last time at the races, with a stud career calling and providing Coolmore with a second Dubawi stallion on its roster.

Another Coolmore-owned Dubawi sire, Henry Longfellow, is shuttling to Rosemont Stud this year.

So, how does Dubawi’s Australian statistics compare to that of Galileo?

The Darley banner horse - the sire of Too Darn Hot - shuttled for three seasons, starting in 2006, Galileo’s last in Australia, where he covered 339 mares during that period.

He sired 234 Australian-bred foals for 188 runners at 11.7 per cent, almost double that of Galileo.

Dubawi’s southern hemisphere-bred Group 1 winners included sprinters Shamal Wind, Tiger Tees and Srikandi as well as top miler Secret Admirer, who sadly died while foaling last week at John Muir’s Milburn Creek in the NSW Southern Highlands.

It is short odds that Delacroix will be on the Coolmore Australia roster next year.

And quickly, on the reverse shuttle front, Starspangledbanner continues to do a stunning job in the northern hemisphere for Coolmore.

Late on Sunday (Australian time), Starspangledbanner’s two-year-old daughter Precise caused a minor upset in the Group 1 Moyglare Stakes at The Curragh, downing her O’Brien-trained stablemate Beautify, a daughter of Wootton Bassett.

Starspangledbanner was narrowly denied a two-year-old Group 1 double with Precise’s stablemate juvenile Gstaad narrowly denied as favourite in the Group 1 National Stakes over 1400m. That race was won by Zavateri.

Aussies and Kiwis off to a flyer

Up in Hong Kong and three meetings into the new season and Newgate Farm’s pensioned stallion Deep Field, champion sire for the past four seasons in the top Asian racing jurisdiction, is off to a flyer.

Deep Field sired a winning treble at Sha Tin on Sunday while Capitalist, another sire on the Newgate roster, had Jubilant Winner score for in-form Kiwi trainer Jamie Richards.

Jubilant Winner was Richards’ fifth victory in three meetings while Australian Mark Newnham had a race-to-race double on Sunday to get off the mark for the new season.

David Hayes and Danny Shum have three winners after three meetings.

Chester in tune with Condominium

After a big win, owners can often celebrate in unusual ways and provide gifts to those who have helped in the long journey to racetrack success.

In the case of Condominium, an All Too Hard mare with two Queanbeyan placings to her name, her new Thai owner celebrated her breakthrough victory at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club recently by composing a song in the five-year-old’s honour.

It’s also a tribute to Magic Millions’ David Chester, a stalwart of the company, who brokered the sale of Condominium to race in Thailand.

Chester, on another mission through Asia drumming up business for next month’s Magic Millions Horses in Training Sale, says in his more than five decades in the game he’s never had a song written about a horse he’s had anything to do with.