After recommending her purchase in November of ‘23 while she was carrying her first foal, we immediately booked Itgetsgreaterlater back to a leggy and lengthy first-year son of Gun Runner standing for $35k who had been a G1 winner at 2YO and 4YO, and a top class campaigner at 3YO as well. After the foal from that mating sold for $160k as a weanling at the recent Keeneland November Sale, we are going to follow an identical pattern for “IGGL” in 2026 and send her to the hugely exciting Locked at Gainesway Farm during his first season at stud.
Of course, the son of Gun Runner that IGGL went to in ‘24 was Gunite, but Locked shares a very similar profile. As out-lined above, Locked was a G1 winner at 2YO of Keeneland’s Breeders’ Futurity after earning TDN Rising Star-dom in his second start at Saratoga, and he then was 3rd in the BC Juvenile to become an Eclipse Award finalist. While he missed the Triple Crown trail the following spring, Locked returned to the races late in the year and was an impressive winner of a 7 furlong allowance race by 7-1/2 lengths, and then took the G2 Cigar Mile over older horses, including Book’em Danno, Mullikin, Post Time and Senor Buscador.
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After finishing 2nd in the G1 Pegasus to kick off his 4YO campaign, Locked won the historic G1 Santa Anita Handicap by the largest margin in the history of the race (8-1/2 lengths) at the classic American distance of 1-1/4 miles. He concluded his career with a gutsy victory in the G2 Woodward Stakes despite being up against it in a three-horse field, retiring with six wins in 11 starts (only once as far back as 4th place) and $1.9 million in earnings.
A $425k yearling purchase, Locked is a long, leggy individual who will be an excellent physical complement to the more compact IGGL.
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Since the time that we sent IGGL to Gunite, the Candy Ride/Johannesburg cross has added G1 winner Gaming to its successful runners (TrueNicks rates the cross a “B”), and Vahva is now another G1 winner on the Gun Runner/Storm Cat cross. Gun Runner has also continued to excel with mares by Tapit (IGGL’s broodmare sire, cross good for nine BTWs so far and an “A+” on TrueNicks).
All of which gives us even more confidence that this pattern is poised to pay off again!