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 we think that their first black-type winner Why Not Tonight will be a perfect mare to send him in his first year at historic Claiborne Farm in 2026.
Interestingly, although neither appears especially bred for turf, that is the surface over which both Johannes and Why Not Tonight excelled, and both around a mile. They are also similar in that after debuting as 2YOs, they had some success at 3 and then achieved their best results at 4YO (Johannes would come back at 5YO to be a graded winner again that season).
As noted above, Johannes is sired by Nyquist, an Eclipse Champion 2YO and only the second horse to complete the BC Juvenile/Kentucky Derby double. At stud, Nyquist has now sired 33 black-type winners including Eclipse Champion 2YOs Vequist and Immersive, plus additional G1 winners like Nysos, Randomized, Tenma, Slow Down Andy, etc. All of those named runners did their best running on dirt — and Nyquist himself raced exclusively on that surface — but he’s had plenty of success with turf runners in addition to Johannes. Johannes’s dam, Cuyathy, was a black-type winner on dirt (though she did win on turf) and she is a daughter of renowned dirt influence A.P. Indy’s dirt son Congrats.
Similarly, Why Not Tonight’s sire is the multiple graded winner Tapiture, who raced exclusively on dirt and whose graded-winning offspring were all dirt performers as well, though he does have some turf and all-weather black-type winners to his credit. Meanwhile, Why Not Tonight’s dam scored all four victories on dirt (and in fact was unplaced in her only two turf tries).
We highlight these similarities because we always prefer a “like-to-like” match versus an “apples-to-oranges” pairing where you’re hoping for an even blend of the parents. This carries over to the physical match as well, with both Johannes and Why Not Tonight being well-balanced horses with enough of size and substance, though she is just a tad leggier and longer-bodied than him.
As far as pedigree goes, Nyquist with Tapit-line mares like Why Not Tonight rates an “A”+” on TrueNicks thanks to the success of Tenma (G1W) and Gosger (G3W and placed in the G1 Preakness in ‘25), with seven total black-type horses from just 23 runners on this cross.
We mentioned at the outset that this mating will also feature a slight variation on the time tested pattern of breeding a young stallion back to mares by his own broodmare sire. In this case, the foal will be inbred 4×5 to A.P. Indy, the sire of Johannes’s broodmare sire Congrats, and the grandsire of Tapiture’s sire Tapit. As well as Nyquist has worked with a bunch of different A.P. Indy lines (Congrats is the broodmare sire of Johannes, Tapit is the broodmare sire of G1W Tenma, Mineshaft is the broodmare sire of Vequist, Bernardini is the broodmare sire of Immersive and Nysos, and A.P. Indy himself is the broodmare sire of Nyquist’s G2W Turnerloose), we think that doubling up on that prolific progenitor of the early 21st century makes loads of sense with Johannes — especially in light of all the other reasons to think he’ll work with Why Not Tonight laid out above!