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For Tuxedo Annie’s 2018 mate, we are looking at a variation on the theme of line-breeding to high class Phipps family mares. This time, we are targeting Tuxedo Annie’s fourth dam, the foundation mare Grey Flight, who also appears twice in the pedigree of her 2018 mate, Blofeld.
Last year, in her match with Golden Years, the most noteworthy aspect of the mating was that it featured line-breeding to the Wheatley Stable mare Dynamo, who is Golden Years’s 6th dam and to whose daughter, the champion filly High Voltage, Tuxedo Annie is inbred 5×5 through a son, Bold Commander, and a daughter, Irradiate.
Grey Flight, meanwhile, was a stakes winner of 12 races from 35 starts, and produced a total of nine stakes winners, including Misty Morn (by Princequillo) and her full-brother Misty Flight, who appear 4×3, respectively, in the pedigree of Blofeld’s second dam, Colonial Minstrel. Misty Morn was the best offspring of Grey Flight – she was a champion on the racetrack and a broodmare of the year in the breeding shed – while Misty Flight won the prestigious Remsen Stakes. And though their Bold Ruler half-sister, Clear Ceiling, was not a stakes winner, she is the second dam of Eclipse Champion Inside Information and Grade 1 winner Educated Risk. Clear Ceiling is also Tuxedo Annie’s third dam.
What that means is that the foal from the mating of Tuxedo Annie with Blofeld will be line-bred 8x7x5 to the “Blue Hen” mare Grey Flight.
In addition to those three lines to Grey Flight, the foal from this mating will have traditional inbreeding to Mr. Prospector and Northern Dancer, 5×4 to both (in fact, both Blofeld and Tuxedo Annie are products of the Mr. Prospector-over-Northern Dancer cross). And, notably, there will be five crosses of Bold Ruler and six of Princequillo in this foal’s pedigree (with only two of each coming through Triple Crown winner Secretariat).
Blofeld himself will be standing his first season at stud in 2018, at Murmur Farm in Maryland. A first-crop son of the impressive young sire Quality Road, Blofeld broke his maiden first-time out going 5 furlongs at Saratoga as a well-bet 2-year-old with a big reputation, before stepping straight into Graded stakes company. He overcame a troubled trip to get up gamely in the Grade 2 Futurity at Belmont in his second start, going 6 furlongs, and then stretched out to a mile and romped by five lengths in the Grade 2 Nashua at Aqueduct, closing out his juvenile campaign three-for-three.
Blofeld started twice at 3, including a 3rd-place finish in the William Walker Stakes, and at 4 he returned to his best form to triumph in last year’s Grade 2 Gulfstream Park Handicap going a mile, over the likes of Stanford and Anchor Down. He retired this summer to Murmur with four wins from 14 starts, and $745,420 in earnings.
From well-cultivated Ned Evans families on both the top and bottom sides of his pedigree (he shares a fourth dam with the likely 2017 Horse of the Year, Gun Runner, and others appearing in his female family include Horse of the Year Saint Liam), Blofeld was a $135,000 weanling, then a $275,000 yearling and a $225,000 2-year-old in-training purchase. He is a big, beautiful horse with plenty of length and leg, and ought to help stretch Tuxedo Annie’s foal out a bit.
With the the Maryland breeding program on the upswing, we are excited to have a Maryland-bred, Maryland-sired foal out of Tuxedo Annie in 2019.
Blofeld wins the G2 Futurity
Blofeld wins the G2 Nashua
Blofeld wins the G2 Gulfstream Park Handicap