The last two champion first-season sires in Australia have been shuttle stallions. With Wootton Bassett and Lucky Vega posting early two-year-old winners, could this season represent a hat-trick? Is Australia in the midst of a shuttle stallion revival?
For anyone who has followed the trajectory of Wootton Bassett as a stallion, particularly the fortunes of the first crop of two-year-olds conceived from Coolmore in Ireland, there was an inevitability about his first Australian-bred winner at Randwick on Saturday.
Australia has arguably never seen a “first-season” shuttle stallion like Wootton Bassett before. Proven as a champion sire before his mid-career purchase by Coolmore, he shuttled to Australia for the first time in 2021.
Coolmore’s faith in him in the Northern Hemisphere has already been justified with a stunning 13 two-year-old stakes winners in 2024 from 113 runners. Four of those were Group 1-winning juvenile colts, all of them owned by Coolmore.
If the Irish-based giant wanted an instant breeding dynasty from their purchase of Wootton Bassett out of France in 2020, they have got exactly that.
To give that achievement some context, the most juvenile Group 1 winners Danehill ever had from a single crop was three and the same is true for Galileo.
There is of course plenty of examples of how what works so brilliantly in one hemisphere, will not necessarily flow on to the other. While Danehill proved a revolutionary force as a shuttler in Australia, Galileo battled to make an impression.
However, Wootton Bassett was given every chance in terms of quantity – 191 mares – and quality, from the get-go at Coolmore Australia. His crop of 123 foals was fourth only behind King’s Legacy, Hanseatic and North Pacific, when it comes to first-season sires that year.
As it stands, he has the second most named current two year-olds, 61 to Farnan’s 67 and has the equal most go to the trials, 16.
The Michael Freedman-trained Pallaton was his sixth Australian-bred two-year-old to go the races and the first one to salute when he comfortably swept aside his rivals on Saturday at Randwick. He is now on the second line of betting for March’s Golden Slipper, while another Wootton Bassett colt, West Of Swindon, is on the third line.
That's a BIG win to Pallaton at Randwick! 🙌@MFreedmanRacing | @TommyBerry21 | @aus_turf_club | @CoolmoreAus pic.twitter.com/txZneOdLTi
— SKY Racing (@SkyRacingAU) December 21, 2024
We are three months from the feature two-year-old race of the Australian season and we can expect a host of other promising prospects by the Coolmore sire to emerge by that time.
Wootton Bassett’s credentials in the juvenile space are franked by his own race record – he won a Group 1 race as a two-year-old - and the fact he has had 35 juvenile stakes winners, including eight Group 1 winners.
That evidence of precocity was no doubt a factor in deciding to shuttle him to Australia.
That is also apparent in the other shuttle sire to make a major impression with his first crop in Australia already this season, Lucky Vega.
The Yulong-based son of Lope de Vaga, won a National Stakes at two in Ireland and already has two winners from his first Australian crop, including Golden Slipper favourite and winner of both the Inglis Nursery and the Inglis Banner, Within The Law.
First-season sires with winners in Australia this season
*Courtesy of Arion.co.nz
Seven of the 15 Northern Hemisphere-bred horses who shuttled to Australia for the 2024 breeding season were Group 1 winning two-year-olds in the track.
As well as the two above, they are Churchill, Pinatubo, St Mark’s Basilica and Native Trail, all of which won the Dewhurst, and Admire Mars, who won the Futurity Stakes in Japan.
Having a race like the Dewhurst, which has been won by the likes of Frankel, Teofilo and Shamardal, as well as Too Darn Hot, last season’s champion Australian freshman sire – who did not shuttle this year – on your resume is an obvious help to get Australian breeders to put aside their preconceptions about shuttle sires.
Another Dewhurst winner, U S Navy Flag, is a recent champion first-season sire in New Zealand.
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Perceptions can change quickly in the bloodstock industry. In between 2004/05 and 2022/23, there was a drought of shuttle sire success when it came to the champion Australian first-season sire.
It was Coolmore’s Justify, a horse that didn’t race as a two-year-old, but who was clearly a generational talent, who broke that run and became the first NH-bred sire to win that honour since More Than Ready. Harry Angel, another shuttler, was third.
Too Darn Hot’s success last year backed that faith in shuttle stallions up. NH-bred Royal Meeting and another Darley shuttler Blue Point finished in the top six.
But only a couple of years back it was a complete Australian domination on the first-season sires table. In the 2021/22 season where Russian Revolution grabbed first-season honours, the top 12 horses in the Australian first-season sires table were Australian bred.
This was no freak result. Australian-bred horses filled the top three positions in 2020/21, 11 of the top 12 in 2019/20 and in 2018/19 and the top five spots in each season between 2016/17 and 2017/18.
First-season sire results are not just about measuring progeny precocity, they are also crucial to the ongoing viability of a shuttle stallion. By the time the first crop hits the track, shuttle stallions are into their fourth year of travelling. By that tim. they have also had their first yearling crop through the sales ring.
There have been 73 individual stallions who have shuttled to Australia in the past decade. Of those 57 have served five seasons or less. That fourth and fifth season is a crucial crossroads in their shuttle careers, with 29 of those 73 shuttlers, or 40 per cent, having served either four or five seasons.
And even if shuttle stallions are a success, there is no guarantee that they will continue beyond that four to five-year window. Justify was a champion first-season sire, but after serving four shuttle seasons over five years, he didn’t return. Too Darn Hot didn’t come back to Darley Australia this year, and while injury played its part, it would be surprising to see him back, such has been his success in the Northern Hemisphere.
Attention moves quickly in the stallion world and the old shuttlers are forgotten as soon as the new ones start being marketed to Australia.
At the upcoming 2025 yearling sales there will be at least 24 first-season stallions represented. There will be three key shuttle stallions, St Mark’s Basilica, Victor Ludorum and Pinatubo plus others like one-season shuttler Palace Pier.
Coolmore’s St Mark’s Basilica has 34 entries on the Gold Coast, 10 at Classic and four at Premier, while Pinatubo has 21, 12 and 12. Palace Pier has 30 across all three sales, while Victor Ludorum has seven.
The market will be sceptical as it always is of the progeny of shuttle stallions, but the success of Justify and Too Dart Hot, plus the early gains from Lucky Vega and Wootton Bassett, show that a different suffix is not necessarily a barrier to early success.
Top NH-bred first-season sire in Australia in each season since 2014/15
