Queen Mum was a black-type runner herself and hails from royal lines. She’s been knocking on the door as a producer, and will get another commercial shot in 2026 with the first-year Eclipse Champion Straight No Chaser at WinStar.
Like many of Speightstown’s descendants, Straight No Chaser was a wickedly fast and talented runner, and he was named 2024’s top 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 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 past 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.
In addition to his own qualifications, we like Straight No Chaser as a match for Queen Mum for a few reasons. First off, her own precocity (she was black-type placed at 2YO and all three of her foals to race have placed at 2) will be a nice complement to Straight No Chaser’s later-maturing tendencies — though he was very fast, he was not especially precocious, in keeping with many from the Speightstown sire-line. Queen Mum will also fit him well physically as a good-sized mare with substance.
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Then there’s the fact that Queen Mum’s highest-earning foal so far is a daughter of the Speightstown son Munnings, and her half-sister is the dam of a Munnings filly named Cougar Cocktail, who is now two-for-two for Brittany Russell and looks like a future stakes filly. Plus there are a G3-placed black-type winner by Munnings and a champion by the Gone West grandson El Corredor under Queen Mum’s second dam — so the Speightstown line is one that has clicked with this family before.
And finally, the cross of Speightstown-line stallions with Awesome Again-line mares like Queen Mum has produced eight black-type winners, half of them graded, which is good for a “B” on TrueNicks.
All of which adds up to what should be a successful pairing for Queen Mum this spring!