I don't mean to insult anyone, but the supposition that a horse is good because you find this mare or that stallion repeated in its pedigree (Nogara, Teresina, Tracery, The Man In The Moon) or these stallions crossed and that one outcrossed is one of the major fictions of horse breeding. The bullshit dosage system is another.

Let's start with dosage first. A few years ago, when the idiots who are the priests of dosage could not make a case for Strike the Gold, they revised the rankings of certain of the stallions in the elite group until they proved that he COULD win the Derby. By then, of course, he had already won it.

Some wiseguy then went and made an analysis of ALL of the foals of that year, and discovered 'lo and behold' that over 70% of them qualified in the dosage range that would enable them to win the Derby. Maybe 20,000 foals in all.

Jiminy, it's really tough to pick the winner from a group like that.

Let's go on to breeding. Since ALL thoroughbreds trace back to three foundation sires from the 18th. century, it is inevitable that you will find repetition of many stallions and mares in tons of pedigrees. Over and over again. It proves nothing.

What made Tesio great? Or Olin Gentry? Or any of these guys? It wasn't their knowledge of bloodlines, no matter how much they may have believed in what they said.

That stuff is mostly fiction. Pleasant memories that filter out the overwhelming number of failures that they had, and no one writes about, when the same crosses or outcrosses did NOT work.

Gentry, to his credit, in an interview late in life, described how he picked stallions with certain physical attributes in the hope that they would override certain physical weaknesses in this or that mare....by God, it worked! He bred some of the great horses of the second half of the past century with this approach.

Why did it work?

Because stallions impact the physicality of the foal, while mares impact the cardio health, the mitochondrial energy of the cell, and the nervous system (which Bob Cook of Tufts researched to prove that it affected breathing and, thus, bleeding...he will also point out that 95% of all horse breeds,including thoroughbreds have RLN, which is a nerve defect that screws up the windpipe in horses...which may be why only 5% of thoroughbreds are stakes horses.)

Find me a good mare, then give me a stallion with a decent physique and I MAY be able to breed a runner.

Certain mares and certain stallions, their sons, have had a tremendous impact on the breed when they are found in the dam's family. But only when they are bred to prepotent stallions who can stamp a foal with a balanced body and good bone.

As I said in an earlier posting: read everything on the Equix Biomechanical web site if you want to know who these stallions have been for the past twenty years, or who to look for next year, and you will be halfway towards finishing the equation. But please don't waste your time talking about inbreeding and line breeding or whatever else. This is one of the most inbred groups of animals on the planet to begin with.

There are a lot of smart bloodline 'experts' in Kentucky, running a lot of breeding farms, picking a lot of stallions every year, spending a lot of money...who NEVER consistently breed a good horse.

Why?

Because they ain't got the mares to begin with. And when they buy fillies for breeding, they look at the wrong things, like pedigrees.