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The match of Seville’s Princess to the leading young Maryland sire Blofeld demonstrates the short-coming of nick ratings and why it is important only to use such a tool as one factor in planning one’s matings.
When we first recommended Seville’s Princess to Blofeld for the 2021 breeding season, we noted the following:
“Looking a little closer-up, this match does not rate highly in TrueNicks at the moment, though the Elusive Quality/Sadler’s Wells cross has produced the Group 1 winner Royal Marine. But we believe that it very much worth noting that Quality Road sired a $1.5 million yearling filly in 2020 out of a Galileo mare named Marvellous, and that filly is now in Ballydoyle with Aidan O’Brien for Peter Brant and the Coolmore partners. Marvellous is one of two G1-winning Galileo mares (and one of three Galileo mares overall) that Coolmore sent to Quality Road that year, and they sent a further 6 Galileo mares to him in 2019 that will be yearlings of 2021 — so we believe that this nick is poised to rate a lot more highly sooner rather than later (Seville’s Princess being by Seville, a Group 1-winning son of Galileo).”
And while that filly out of Marvellous didn’t amount to anything on the racetrack, three of the six Galileo mares referenced as having been bred to Quality Road in 2019 produced graded/group horses from those matings: Up is now the dam of G2W Aspray, Cuff is the dam of G3W Cairo, and Butterflies is the dam of G3PW Carracci. TrueNicks has now updated this mating to an “A+” rating.
Meanwhile, Blofeld has also raised his own profile substantially since the beginning of 2021: he now has three crops of racing age totaling 74 foals, of which he has 39 winners from 53 to race, including 4 black-type winners (5.4% to foals, 7.6% to runners) and another 6 black-type placed offspring (for a total of 13.5% black-type earners/foals, and an astronomical 18.9% black-type earners/runners). His average starter earns north of $75,000, and he sports a fantastic 1.40 AEI/1.14 CI ratio – meaning he’s achieving these stats without significant help from his mates. After his son Johnyz From Albany and daughter Chickieness swept the 2022 Maryland Million 2YO races, Blofeld picked up back-to-back winners of the Maryland Million Lassie when Miss Harriett scored a gutsy win in that race in ‘23.
Some additional things that we noted back in 2021 which still apply for this repeat mating are that the foal from this mating will be inbred 4×4 to the 1981 Kentucky Derby winner (a pattern now responsible for Eclipse Champion/G1W British Idiom and G3W Highestdistinction from just 83 starters). Blofeld himself still has the full-brothers His Majesty (sire of Pleasant Colony) and Graustark in his pedigree, as well as a third cross of their dam Flower Bowl through her daughter Bowl of Flowers, who appears in the pedigree of Quality Road’s broodmare sire Strawberry Road, and these duplications are reinforced thanks to the appearance of Pleasant Tap in Seville’s Princess’s pedigree, as are the two strains of Grey Flight, who appears in Blofeld’s pedigree through her grandson Sunrise Flight (broodmare sire of Pleasant Colony) and her son Misty Flight (sire of Blofeld’s 4th dam). We also like that Nijinsky shows up again in Seville’s Princess’s pedigree, as he does in Blofeld’s pedigree in conjunction with his close relatives The Minstrel and Storm Bird. In addition to the inbreeding and line breeding identified above, Blofeld happens to be out of a Storm Cat dam, and Seville’s Princess is a half-sister to a stakes winner by Storm Cat’s son Tale of the Cat, plus 3 other winners by Storm Cat-line stallions, which bodes well for this mating.
And perhaps more importantly than all of the above is that the foal from the first iteration of this mating produced what might be the nicest physical ever bred by Wasabi Ventures Stables. That soon-to-be-2YO filly named Blo By the Field is in the middle of receiving her early lessons at the Middleburg Training Center and will hopefully reach the races in 2024, when she’ll give this recommendation a further upgrade!
