Run The Numbers – Who is Australia’s greatest two-year-old sire?

Even for Australia’s two dominant stallions of the past decade, Snitzel and I Am Invincible, the percentage of their progeny that race as two-year-olds is relatively small.

Only 42.8 per cent of Snitzel’s 2144 foals, which are now of racing age, have raced as juveniles, while for I Am Invincible that figure stands at 41.2 per cent.

Of the current two-year-old crop, the late Snitzel, a five-time leading two-year-old sire, has just nine runners to the track from 112 foals, while I Am Invincible has just five from 119.

We can expect those numbers to increase significantly by season’s end, but the reality is, two-year-olds provide just a sample size of a stallion’s performance.

However, they do continue to provide an outsized influence when it comes to commercial value.

Snitzel is the most influential sire of Australian two-year-olds this century by almost every measure. Not only was he champion two-year-old sire in 2016/17, 2017/18, 2019/20, 2022/23 and 2024/25, but he also has three of the past eight Golden Slipper winners.

Across his career, he has 62 Australian-conceived juvenile stakes winners, a record among all stallions. Others have greater global totals but can’t surpass Snitzel’s juvenile record in Australia.

His own grandsire Danehill, for example, has 102 two-year-old stakes winners, but only 58 of them were bred from his Australian bases, Exceed And Excel has 88 globally, but 54 in Australia, while of More Than Ready’s 85 international black-type winning two-year-olds, 40 were bred from his Vinery Stud base in the Hunter Valley.   

The only active stallion with a chance to catch Snitzel, who still has three two-year-old crops (including the current one) to come, is I Am Invincible, whose 52 stakes winners were all conceived at Yarraman Park.

Snitzel also has the most Australian-conceived two-year-old winners on 321, well clear of I Am Invincible on 249, while Exceed And Excel has 246.  

It’s worth noting that Snitzel did shuttle to Japan for two seasons, so his Australian-conceived numbers and his overall numbers differ. For the sake of fair comparison, we have opted to look at only Australian-conceived data.

I Am Invincible does have a superior two-year-old stakes-winners-to-runners record to his great rival, with 7.58 per cent as compared to Snitzel’s 7.33 per cent, but Snitzel edges him when it comes to Group winners percentage (4.37 per cent to 3.94 per cent) and overall winners-to-runners (37.94 per cent to 36.30 per cent).

Those percentages are at the top end of Australian sires since 1990. I Am Invincible’s 7.58 per cent SW/R rate is second only to Danehill (11.09 per cent for SH-bred progeny) for those with more than 100 two-year-old runners.

Snitzel’s 37.94 per cent W/R rate with his two-year-olds is higher than any other Australian-based stallion when it comes to southern hemisphere conceived progeny. Second on that list is his former barnmate Not A Single Doubt, who had 36.81 per cent W/R, and then I Am Invincible.

Danehill’s overall W/R with two-year-olds was 39 per cent, but it was 33.84 per cent with those conceived in Australia, which is interesting given his superior stakes-producing record with his Australian-bred horses.

The top three ranked on group winners-to-runners for Australian-conceived progeny are Danehill (5.74 per cent), Redoute’s Choice (4.58 per cent) and Snitzel (4.37 per cent).

There is a current Australian stallion with a much higher success rate, Extreme Choice, but his extraordinary percentages have come from a smaller sample size of just 72 runners.

The Newgate star is running at 9.72 per cent two-year-old stakes winners to runners, with seven stakes winners, including three Group 1 winners.  He is also running at 6.94 per cent group winners to runners, a rate higher than his great grandsire Danehill.

That is being achieved from an even smaller subset of just 19 juvenile winners across six crops. Interestingly, Extreme Choice’s W/R rate is a relatively low 26.39 per cent, but 37 per cent of his juvenile winners have been stakes winners, a rate nearly twice as high as Snitzel’s.

Leading stallions by key two-year-old statistics on Australian-conceived progeny since 1990