C’est Mardi was a successful and versatile racemare who scored a half-dozen victories during her career, but didn’t hit her best stride until she was an older horse — as such, she’s going to get a chance with a more precocious runner and sire in Thousand Words, in an effort to add some early-maturing tendencies to her ‘27 foal.
Thousand Words was himself a $1 million yearling purchase and then a G2-winning 2YO and G3-winning 3YO on the Triple Crown trail for Bob Baffert, and he came out with a pair of graded stakes-winning 2YOs in his first crop last year. He’s now up to seven black-type winners (better than 5% to runners) between his first two crops, including Andrea, who is also G2-placed, and the multiple black-type winner A Thousand Miles — who are noteworthy for being out of a mare by Tiznow and his son Colonel John, respectively. In fact, Thousand Words has sired five runners from mares by Tiznow or one of his sons, with those two black-type winners plus another winner (good enough, despite the small sample size, for TrueNicks to call it an “A++”).
We think that is a promising-enough start to the cross to give C’est Mardi a shot with Thousand Words, especially given his earlier-maturing tendencies that we identified above. Additionally, one of the reasons that we would speculate that this cross is working is that Thousand Words and his sire-line can be a tad fragile on occasion, which is not what anyone has ever said about Tiznow. So we like that complement out of this pairing. And Thousand Words’s sire Pioneerof the Nile has done very well with Storm Cat-line mares like C’est Mardi’s broodmare sire Storm Creek (most notably with Triple Crown winner American Pharoah and Champion Classic Empire) while Thousand Words himself has a ‘25 black-type winning 2YO bred on that cross.
There is also the fact that C’est Mardi is a half-sister to a G3 winner by Eurosilver, an Unbridled-line stallion like Thousand Words. And though we have previously focused on the AP Indy/Tapit sire-line for C’est Mardi, we have tried to get (more) Unbridled blood into some of her mates for that very reason.
Physically, Thousand Words is a beautifully-balanced, medium-sized, very pretty horse, and he’ll be a nice like-to-like match for C’est Mardi, who also has plenty of size, substance and balance to her (and has thrown a very pretty first foal with those traits as well).
All of which is a long way of saying that Thousand Words should suit C’est Mardi very well!