Written Tycoon’s championship-winning 2020/21 season as a sire is perhaps unfairly portrayed as a wedge between two eras. Before him, his contemporary Snitzel had won the Australian sires title on four consecutive occasions, and after him has come a hat-trick of victories for I Am Invincible.
But the son of Iglesia is back on top of the rankings again after Saturday’s Caulfield Guineas win by Private Life, four years after another Written Tycoon colt, Ole Kirk, won that same race.
The sense of déjà vu is completed by the fact he now has an almost identical amount of progeny earnings, $5.3 million, as he had at the same point of that 2020/21 season. Could we be seeing history repeating?
That season was monumental for Written Tycoon for a couple of other reasons.
He began it in the Hunter Valley for the first time, standing at Arrowfield, in what proved a one-season stint. He was then placed on the market in the autumn of 2021 and Yulong came calling with an offer, said to be in the area of $22 million.
When the deal was done on April 19 that year, Written Tycoon was placed second in a three-way fight for the sires’ title, behind Not A Single Doubt and ahead of I Am Invincible. By season’s end, the burgeoning Victorian-based outfit had an Australian champion sire as Written Tycoon held off I Am Invincible by just over $1.25 million.
His leading earner that year was his Guineas winner Ole Kirk, an impeccably bred son now making his mark at Vinery Stud, the ‘underbidder’ on Written Tycoon in 2021.
Such is the delay between the breeding shed and the track, three-and-half years later, we are yet to see the ‘racing’ significance of Yulong’s investment, with his oldest crop conceived at the farm having just turned two.
But off the back of that Arrowfield-conceived crop, who are now three, he is building up the numbers and climbing back up the sires’ table.
As things stand, Written Tycoon now has two Group 1 winners in Australia this season, three stakes winners and 42 winners in total. At the same point in 2020/21, those figures were three Group 1 winners, six stakes winners and 58 winners.
Again, he is leading I Am Invincible on the sires table, but that will change significantly after Saturday’s The Everest, where the winner (and their sire) will be allotted $7.5 million in prize money (regardless of what the actual split between the slot holder and the ownership may be). Written Tycoon has Lady Of Camelot in the first Group 1 edition of the race.
Written Tycoon progeny record in Australia as of October 14:
As Tim Rowe pointed out in his Rowe On Monday column, that Golden Slipper-winning filly, Group 1-winning Kiwi filly Velocious and Private Life are all from the one season that Written Tycoon spent at Arrowfield.
That crop is making a major mark, with six stakes winners already from 79 runners. That is already the equal third best of all of Written Tycoon’s crops, and they are only midway through the spring of their Classic season.
Given where they were conceived, it is perhaps not surprising that three of those six stakes winners, including Private Life, are out of mares by Arrowfield’s four-time champion stallion Snitzel.
It is an interesting generational disjunct given those two sires were foaled 13 days apart and finished alongside each other in the 2005 Golden Slipper. But Written Tycoon has been a late bloomer in the breeding barn.
So far this season, Written Tycoon has more three-year-old winners in Australia than any other sire, with 17 (Snitzel is second on 16). Interestingly, that is one Australian three-year-old winner more than Written Tycoon had at the same point of his championship-winning 2020/21 campaign.
He spent that one season in the Hunter Valley at a relative discount fee of $77,000. Either side of that year his fee at his final season at Woodside was $110,000, while he debuted at Yulong at $165,000.
The average yearling price of that Arrowfield crop was $295,226, an excellent return on investment. And a lot of the big colt buyers targetted them, including Coolmore’s Tom Magnier, who secured Private Life on the Gold Coast for $650,000, as well as Public Attention, fifth in Saturday’s Guineas, at Karaka.
Significantly Coolmore, which doesn’t have a son of Written Tycoon on its roster, now has a Group 1-winning colt to add to the stallion mix. The global giant already has his Group 1-winning daughters, Coolangatta and Booker, in its broodmare band.
But the biggest buyer of Written Tycoon’s Arrowfield-conceived crop was Yulong. Not willing to wait the extra year for their own bred crop to emerge from a stellar broodmare band, the emerging powerhouse spent $8.7 million across 20 Written Tycoon yearlings in 2023.
Among that collection is Group 2 Danehill Stakes winner and leading chance for the Coolmore Stud Stakes, First Settler, along with Group 3 winner Althoff.
The logic of that move from a colts’ perspective is the need to identify an heir relatively quickly.
At 22, his fertility is being managed. After books of 199 and 172 in his first two seasons at Yulong, he served 96 mares, his fewest since 2008, at a private fee last year. His book is expected to be smaller again this year.
But he is far from a diminishing force on the sires' table, with his best-bred stock still to make it the track. The current two-year-old crops include colts out of multiple Group 1 winners In Her Time and Politeness and fillies by elite mares Aloisia and Melody Belle.
Among the current yearling crop are colts by Tofane, In Her Time, Hungry Heart and Foxplay and a filly by Away Game.
We can expect a substantial number of these blueblood Written Tycoons to be in the Yulong colours at the pointy end of Australia’s biggest races, keeping him up near the top of the sires' table for a few years to come.
Written Tycoon crop by crop:
