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We gave I’m Engaged a year off after a late foaling in 2023, but with two of her foals now over $100k in lifetime earnings and with her 3YO daughter having won two races already and looking potentially stakes class, we’re excited to get her back to the breeding shed in 2024. But instead of heading to Kentucky as she has done for every other mating of her career, this time around she’s going to stay in Maryland and visit Blofeld in what will hopefully be a productive mating for the racetrack, if not the sales ring.
If you’ve been reading our blog then you know how highly we think of Blofeld by now. With three crops totaling 74 foals so far of racing age, he has 44 winners from 55 to race, including 5 black-type winners (6.8% to foals, 9.1% to runners) and another 6 black-type placed offspring (for a total of 14.9% black-type earners/foals, and an astronomical 20% black-type earners/runners). His average starter earns north of $84,500 and his runners’ median earnings sits at over $63,000. He sports a fantastic 1.45 AEI/1.13 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, and then most recently his first-crop daughter Charming Way took the open company Nellie Morse Stakes going 1-1/16 miles as a 5YO. Off the strength of these racetrack results, Blofeld has covered more mares than any stallion in the state for the last two years.
Thus far he has a four-time winner from a single foal out of a Broken Vow mare like I’m Engaged, and TrueNicks rates the mating highly — they call the Quality Road/Broken Vow cross an “A++” on the basis of a G3W and another SW bred that way. We also like that Blofeld has had incredible success when mated back to mares from the Storm Cat sire-line (his own dam is by Storm Cat), with six winners from seven runners bred this way, including a trio of stakes winners (two black-type) — because while I’m Engaged is free of Storm Cat, her granddam Starlet Storm is bred very similarly to him, being by Storm Bird and out of a Secretariat mare.
I’m Engaged’s female family has had some success with the Gone West sire-line that’s responsible for Blofeld, most notably with the SW/G3P 2YO Raucous, by Speightstown, as well as recent 2024 debut winner Falcon of Arabia, by Speightstown, in Dubai.
Physically this is a mating that we are very excited about — I’m Engaged is a medium-sized, fairly feminine mare who has thrown bigger foals than what she is herself, and Blofeld’s size and substance should definitely lean into that tendency. And given the success that each of them has had producing winners, we’re hoping for a state-bred foal from this pairing that will run and earn breeder bonuses for a long, long time!