After visiting the wickedly-fast Speightstown son Nashville for both of the last two breeding seasons, we’ll switch it up — sort of — and Giving Spirit will head to another young WinStar stallion for ‘26 in the Speightstown grandson Straight No Chaser.
The appeal of the Speightstown sire-line for Giving Spirit continues to be the fact that she is a half-brother to the potentially high-class colt Maycocks Bay. Unfortunately, Maycocks Bay appears not to be the least-fragile horse in training, but he put together back-to-back allowance victories last January and last November on either side of a ten-month layoff, then subsequently finished 3rd in the G3 Mineshaft Stakes at the Fair Grounds in a very deep field. He raced only once more after that placing before hitting the sidelines again, but recently popped up on the Fair Grounds worktab with a bullet three-furlong drill in mid-November. So hopefully he still has some running left to do.
In the meantime, Giving Spirit’s 2YO half-sister Fond of You (by Street Sense) is a black-type placed winner this season for the same Godolphin/Michael Stidham collaboration that’s responsible for Maycocks Bay, and there’s a weanling Street Sense half-sister in the pipeline as well.
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So this is a classy, precocious family that is very active (under the 2nd dam is new ‘25 black-type winner Runnin N Gunnin), and that makes Giving Spirit a good mare to send to a commercial first-year stallion like Straight No Chaser.
In addition to being from the “right” sire-line for Giving Spirit, Straight No Chaser has plenty of other qualifications. First and foremost, like many of Speightstown’s descendants, he was a wickedly fast and talented runner who was named the ‘24 Eclipse Champion Sprinter off the back of victories in the G1 Breeders’ Cup Sprint and G2 Santa Anita Sprint Championship. He also scored in the G3 Maryland Sprint Stakes the preceding season as a 4YO, and this year at 6YO he was successful in the G2 Riyadh Dirt Sprint. All told, he won seven of his 14 starts, on dirt and turf, for earnings of over $2.6 million.
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We were very pleasantly surprised at how leggy and stretchy Straight No Chaser was when we first saw him in person this November. Rather than the more typical, compact, sprinter-type physique that one might have expected, Straight No Chaser is a tall, long, leggy physical, which should make his foals very well-suited to the commercial market when the time comes. And this will also make him a great choice for Giving Spirit, who does favor her compact, medium-sized sire Ghostzapper in terms of phenotype.
Speaking of Ghostzapper, he has done very well underneath Storm Cat-line stallions, so the fact that Straight No Chaser is out of a Johannesburg mare is another reason that we really like him for Giving Spirit.
All-in-all, this is a mating that has a lot going for it and we are excited to see the foal that it produces in 2027!