Nearly 40 years after she caught the eye of Australian connections at a tried horse sale in Saratoga, Dancing Show’s impact continues to be felt, with maternal descendants Marhoona and Schwarz winning Group 1 races on Saturday. This week’s Run The Numbers charts her influence.
A sales ring in New York and Rosehill on Golden Slipper day may seem a world apart, but on Saturday, after three decades of trying, that journey was completed as a maternal descendant of the phenomenally influential Dancing Show won the world’s richest two-year-old race for the first time.
The story of how Dancing Show got to Australia goes that influential breeder Norman Carlyon’s son Peter wanted a Nijinksy mare to breed to American-based Miswaki. She was selected on the advice of pedigree expert Ken McLean for $75,000 out of the Fasig-Tipton sales ring in 1987.
She was part of a package of mares put together as a breeding venture by bloodstock figure Rob Roulston with a group of six investors.
Dancing Show headed firstly to New Zealand to foal down the resultant colt, before an onward journey across the Tasman.
In 1991, that Miswaki colt, Umatilla, trained by Tommy Hughes and winner of WA’s best two-year-old race, the Karrakatta Plate, contested the Golden Slipper, but would finish near the tail of the field in 12th.
Three years later, Dancing Show’s son by Star Watch, Hurricane Sky, came into the Golden Slipper as one of the leading chances having won the Blue Diamond Stakes. But eventual winner Danzero swept past him in the final stages, almost knocking him off his feet at the same time. Hurricane Sky would only finish fifth.
While Dancing Show was making a major impression as a broodmare, Roulston and co sold her in foal to Chief's Crown in 1996 as she had become a Grade 2 wobbler and was uninsurable.
None of Dancing Show’s remaining progeny would contest the Slipper, but in 1999 her grandson Redoute’s Choice was a short-priced favourite for the race, having also won the Blue Diamond. He was famously scratched on the morning of the Slipper.
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