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By now you’ve seen our repeated posts — here and on social media — about how well the young Maryland stallion Blofeld has done with his small first crop of runners. Through the first few months of 2022, he’s had 12 of his first-crop 3YOs race and all 12 of those have won — an outstanding statistic that tracks his overall winners/runners ratio of 14 from 14 (out of just 24 foals in his first crop). With these first runners suggesting that Blofeld might be a sire on the rise, we have booked several mares of our own to Blofeld this year, and have recommended him to numerous Mid-Atlantic-based clients for their mares. One of those mares heading his way on our recommendation is the two-time winning Kitten’s Joy mare Vibrant Spirit.
Although this match does not rate highly in TrueNicks at the moment (they call the Elusive Quality/El Prado cross a “D”), there are a stakes winner and three more black-type placed horses bred this way, and the Elusive Quality/Sadler’s Wells cross (so one generation further back on the bottom side) has produced the Group 1 winner Royal Marine. We also believe that it very much worth noting that Quality Road has six 2YOs in Ballydoyle this year for Coolmore out of Galileo mares (Galileo being a son of Sadler’s Wells), so smarter people than us believe in this broader cross.
Another piece of Vibrant Spirit’s pedigree that works in her favor with Blofeld is that she’s out of a mare by Indian Charlie, and his broodmare sire, Leo Castelli, is a son of Sovereign Dancer. Sovereign Dancer’s second dam is the Blue Hen mare Grey Flight, and Blofeld’s pedigree already contains two other crosses of Grey Flight, so we like that reinforcement quite a bit. Especially since one of Blofeld’s most promising winners to this point, Royal Spy, is out of a Louis Quatorze mare (he being another son of Sovereign Dancer) — so that extra Grey Flight definitely isn’t going to hurt.
Physically, Blofeld is a strapping, lengthy horse with plenty of leg, whereas Vibrant Spirit is a bit more compact — so hopefully he will stretch out her foal a bit. But their racetrack proclivities already align well, both having been at their best at about a mile. And Blofeld already has a promising turf winner early in this grass-racing season, which bodes well for his chances of getting a good grass horse out of a turf-bred mare like Vibrant Spirit.