Heart’s Cry’s good season was also boosted by a second winner of the Japan Cup, Suave Richard. Yoshida was an important international Group/Grade 1 winner for him, along with Japan’s current Horse of the Year, the Cox Plate and Arima Kinen winner Lys Gracieux, and the late Caulfield Cup winner Admire Rakti. In second place last year was Heart’s Cry, who, at 19, is no spring chicken, but is stealthily compiling his own impressive stud record. Following Sunday Silence’s dominance, his son Deep Impact has written his own important chapter in Japanese breeding and was crowned champion sire for the ninth year running in 2019, five months after his death. “In American bloodstock, if you look back over the last several decades, I think the one horse every American thinks ‘damn, we let him get away’ was Sunday Silence,” says WinStar’s Director of Bloodstock Services Sean Tugel. His legacy is immense.Įlliott Walden is President, CEO and Racing Manager of WinStar Farm – Photo: Tattersalls/Laura Green Sunday Silence led the Japanese sires’ table from 1995, when members of his first crop turned three, consistently through to 2007, five years after he had succumbed to laminitis. Neither he nor his sons Katsumi, Teruya and Haruya will have regretted that move. Zenya Yoshida bought a quarter-share in Sunday Silence during his four-year-old season and, after Hancock was unable to sell more than a handful of shares in him despite his first-class racing record, the Japanese breeder bought out his partners and took his new stallion home. Mind you, Sunday Silence’s breeder, Arthur B Hancock III, had been unable to sell the son of Halo as a yearling and as a two-year-old and ended up racing him in partnership with Dr Ernest Gaillard and trainer Charlie Whittingham. In hindsight, it seems extraordinary that the 1989 Horse of the Year ended up heading to the Shadai Stallion Station only because he was given such a lukewarm reception by breeders in Kentucky. In the case of the new WinStar stallion, his name comes from his breeder, Katsumi Yoshida of Japan’s Northern Farm, but it could equally apply to Katsumi’s father, Zenya Yoshida, the founder of Shadai Farm who was responsible for arguably the most significant chapter in the history of Japanese thoroughbred breeding when importing Sunday Silence in 1991. There’s always a risk involved when naming a horse in honour of a person, but it worked for Frankel and it has also worked for Yoshida, who is by Sunday’s Silence’s increasingly prevalent son Heart’s Cry. And, as WinStar celebrates its 20th anniversary, there’s plenty to keep that dream alive.ĭuring those two decades, the stallion roster has grown from two to 19 – the venerable Distorted Humor, now 27, bridging the era of the Preston brothers’ ownership of the Bluegrass farm under its previous moniker of Prestonwood, to its present-day status as the bloodstock empire of Kenny Troutt.Īs the Kentucky operation moves into its third decade it has welcomed two new names to its line-up for 2020: the Grade 1 Florida Derby winner Audible, a son of the newly crowned American champion sire Into Mischief, and the dual Grade 1 winner Yoshida.Īs the latter’s name suggests, he originates from the east but one doesn’t need to look too far back in his pedigree to find names with which breeders in the west, particularly in the US, will be more than familiar. That’s the motto at WinStar Farm as well as a mantra for breeders worldwide.
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