Johannes was a brilliant G1 turf-miler whose once-beaten 4YO campaign earned him a nod as an Eclipse Award finalist, and he is the first son of leading young stallion Nyquist to stand at stud in Kentucky. The combination of his speed, talent, pedigree and well-balanced physical have us excited that our friends at Wasabi will be supporting him at stud, and the second mare that they’ll be sending to him in his first year at Claiborne is the Juddmonte-bred Paw Prints.
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Though he has a pedigree that appears suited more towards dirt, Johannes himself was strictly a turf performer. We are going to lean into this proclivity of his with Paw Prints, who is a daughter of the top class turf runner and sire Kitten’s Joy, from a Juddmonte family that has excelled over predominantly European turf (and even the one most recent standout North American runner under her first dam — 2025 G3 winner Final Gambit — scored his biggest victory on synthetic).
Although her family hasn’t had opportunities with Nyquist or his sire Uncle Mo, Paw Prints is a half-sister to the multiple G3-placed runner and stakes producer Straight Thinking, by Mizzen Mast — and Mizzen Mast and Uncle Mo both trace tail-male to Caro (sire of the likes of Winning Colors, With Approval, Cozzene, etc). There are also the black-type winners Pavlosk and Rostova further back on her page by Arch, who is Uncle Mo’s broodmare sire. So there are some reasons to think that this pedigree play will work, even if they aren’t immediately obvious.
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TrueNicks rates this match as an “A+” with nine black-type winners bred on the Uncle Mo/El Prado cross, highlighted by 2025 G1 winner Seismic Beauty, plus additional graded winners Showcase and Scalding.
And then physically, this is a great case of “like-to-like” with both Johannes and Paw Prints being well-balanced individuals with plenty of body and substance.
So there is plenty to recommend this pairing, and we’re very excited to see what Paw Prints produces from Johannes’s first crop in 2027!