The South African stallion statistics, provided by the NHA, play a valuable role for owners and breeders. They help identify prominent sires, and underline promising young stallions who are on the way up, writes Sarah Whitelaw.
The stats also honour South Africa’s leading sires, and can ultimately uncover underrated stallions, who don’t always receive their rightful recognition (ie the stats reflecting Average Earnings Per Runner, etc). However, the statistics themselves can only be regarded as incomplete and inconclusive, as they don’t reflect a sire’s overseas earnings.
Not only does this omission mean the figures themselves are inaccurate, and often misleading, but they fail to reflect fairly on South African stallions whose offspring are excelling overseas. It is important for South Africa to have two full sets of South African general sire statistics, one which includes only local earnings, and the other reflecting all outside earnings as well as local.
Stallions succeeding overseas deserve to be given more credit for their achievements – it is considerably harder for a sire to succeed internationally than locally, and when they do, it is essential that local breeders and buyers have access to that information. One country which does use both a local and international group of stats for their stallions is North America. One of the USA’s prime racing publications, The Blood-Horse, has two general sires lists – one for local and the other reflecting both local and overseas earnings.
In 2013, Kitten’s Joy topped the general sires log, which includes all earnings in the Northern Hemisphere (with the exception of Hong Kong and Japan). The North American earnings log was also topped by Kitten’s Joy. South Africa’s current status quo regarding the stallion stats means a number of top sires don’t receive an accurate report of current achievements.
One such example is Drakenstein Stud’s Trippi. Currently 10th on the South African general sires list, Trippi would take much higher ranking if his overseas statistics were included. In fact, Trippi’s overseas earnings (dating from August 1st to 7 Feb) would ensure that the son of End Sweep would go to the top of the sires log (please see table attached). Trippi’s overseas runners have earned in excess of R19 000 000 during the time period stipulated.
It also seems unfair that other SA based sires’ stats don’t reflect the overseas deeds of their sons and daughters. A classic example being National Assembly, Mogok and National Emblem – who in recent years have been represented by the outstanding international gallopers Soft Falling Rain, The Apache and Shea Shea respectively. However, the major international victories by these SOUTH AFRICAN bred horses don’t show in their sires stats – a poor and glaring omission. Surely at least one South African statistic table should include races run by ALL locally bred horses – whether they run in the Northern Hemisphere, Zimbabwe or Mauritius?
Clearly, something needs to be done, to ensure that South Africans have access to statistics which fairly reflect the individual sire’s success, both here and abroad.
