The Aga Khan's unbeaten Arc winner Zarkava

Aga Khan tribute | A Grandmaster in 'game of chess with nature'

By John Ingles

Horse Racing

Fri February 07, 2025 · 2M ago

Following the death of the Aga Khan this week, John Ingles looks at how the owner-breeder built on the legacy of his father and grandfather.

The death of the Aga Khan at the age of 88 means the loss of another of the great owner-breeders four years or so after the demise of Khalid Abdullah and Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum. But in contrast to the latter pair’s respective creations, Juddmonte and Shadwell, the Aga Khan’s bloodstock empire wasn’t created from scratch of his own volition but instead was imposed on him as a family legacy.

At the age of just 23, Prince Karim inherited a thriving racing and breeding operation which had been founded by his grandfather who had bought his first yearling in 1921. Aga Khan III, Sultan Mohamed Shah, went on to win 17 English classics, including the Derby five times, notably with Bahram who completed the Triple Crown in 1935. In all, Aga Khan III was champion owner in Britain 13 times and the leading breeder eight times. Sooner than expected, however, his bloodstock passed to his young grandson Karim as, just three years after the ‘old’ Aga Khan’s death in 1957, his son Prince Aly Khan, who had inherited his father’s horses, was killed in a car crash in Paris at the age of 48.

In the year before his death, Prince Aly Khan had been leading owner in Britain, Ireland and France, with Petite Etoile winning the 1000 Guineas and Oaks and Saint Crespin the Eclipse and Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Now, the young Aga Khan, who had just completed his studies at Harvard and who had next to no experience in racing, suddenly found himself the inheritor of a highly successful thoroughbred operation. However, the Aga Khan took on that responsibility only after satisfying himself that firstly, the bloodstock operation would be self-financing, and secondly, that the time he needed to devote to it would not be detrimental to the obligations he had also inherited from his grandfather as a religious leader.

The Aga Khan started out with a much-reduced broodmare band of just over fifty mares after having to sell some stock to cover the cost of death duties and to buy out his siblings who between them inherited most of their father’s bloodstock but weren’t interested in retaining their shares. In his first year as an owner, 1960, the Aga Khan won the Prix du Jockey Club and Grand Prix de Paris with Charlottesville, while his winners in Britain included Sheshoon in the Gold Cup (he too trained in France by Alec Head who had trained for his father and grandfather) and Petite Etoile in the Coronation Cup.

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As a newcomer to the world of racing and breeding, the Aga Khan was determined to make a success of his inheritance and learned quickly – though he modestly said his apprenticeship took twenty years - and during the 1970s took some important steps which not only put his own mark on the operation he had inherited but laid the foundations of success for decades to come. One of those moves was the creation of a purpose-built private training centre at Aiglemont near Chantilly.

From 1977 it became the base for Francois Mathet who had been the Aga Khan’s principal French trainer since 1965; on Mathet’s death in 1981, he was succeeded by Alain de Royer-Dupre until his retirement at the end of 2021. Not least among de Royer-Dupre’s achievements was winning the very first running of the Breeders’ Cup Turf for the Aga Khan with Lashkari in 1984. The Aga Khan won the same race again in 2000 with Kalanisi and in 2020 with Tarnawa and retained an interest in Godolphin’s 1999 winner Daylami who had begun his career in his breeder’s colours. De Royer-Dupre’s former assistant Francis-Henri Graffard then took over the helm at Aiglemont and provided the Aga Khan with his final winner in Britain last year when high-class gelding Calandagan ran away with the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot.

While the Aga Khan came to rely almost entirely on his home-bred stock – part of that self-financing policy - his purchase of a yearling by Red God at Tattersalls in 1974 proved to be an inspired one. The colt had already been registered as Blushing Groom when he was sold, which explains his atypical name for an Aga Khan horse. After becoming France’s champion two-year-old, he won the Poule d’Essai des Poulains but didn’t stay the Derby trip, finishing third to The Minstrel when sent off favourite at Epsom.

Blushing Groom had much more significance for the Aga Khan than simply becoming a top-class racehorse (Timeform rating 136) in the short term. His syndication as a stallion funded the purchase in 1977 of all 82 horses from the estate of another leading owner Madame Francois Dupre. Among that new stock was the yearling Top Ville who went on to win the Prix du Jockey Club in 1979. In turn, Top Ville’s syndication (unlike US export Blushing Groom, Top Ville remained in France as one of the Aga Khan’s own stallions) financed the purchase of the entire string of an even more significant owner-breeder, Marcel Boussac, who was facing bankruptcy. Again, the Aga Khan struck lucky as one of the broodmares in the Boussac deal turned out to be carrying a filly, Akiyda, who would become the Aga Khan’s first Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner in 1982.

Rather than rely on auction purchases to bring new blood into his broodmare band, the Aga Khan made further wholesale purchases of other breeders’ stock in later decades which, sooner or later, yielded further success. For example, Harzand, the last of the Aga Khan’s five Derby winners in 2016 (equalling his grandfather’s record in the race), traced back to one of around a dozen mares purchased privately in the late-1980s from the Cleaboy Stud stock developed by the great English owner-breeder Major Lionel Holliday.

Many more horses, along with studs and land, were involved when the late Jean-Luc Lagardere’s thriving bloodstock empire changed hands in the spring of 2005. That year’s high-class miler Valixir, winner of the Prix d’Ipahan and Queen Anne Stakes, was among the Aga Khan’s new acquisitions. Among longer-term fruits resulting from the Lagardere transfer was Siyouni, an appropriate winner of the Prix Jean-Luc Lagardere and who is nowadays one of Europe’s leading stallions, standing at the Aga Khan’s Haras de Bonneval at a fee of €200,000. Another was Vadeni from the same family as Valixir. He was the last of the Aga Khan’s eight Prix du Jockey Club winners in 2022 and provided his owner with a first win in the Eclipse the following month.

Another important development in the 1970s was the Aga Khan’s decision to have horses trained in Britain from the end of that decade. Disenchanted with prize money levels in Britain, his grandfather had concentrated his string in France from 1952, though Petite Etoile was one of a few horses Prince Aly Khan had in training with Noel Murless at Newmarket in the meantime. Two young trainers, Michael Stoute and Fulke Johnson Houghton were originally chosen to share the Aga Khan’s British-based string.

Among Stoute’s second batch of yearlings from the Aga Khan was Shergar, the best horse bred and owned by the Aga Khan who achieved an outstanding Timeform rating of 140 and whose ten-length victory when becoming the Aga Khan’s first Derby winner in 1981 remains a race record. Shergar’s story was a bitter-sweet one, though, ending with his kidnap and disappearance after one season at stud, and despite further classic success, a couple of contested big-race results put a strain on the Aga Khan’s relationship with the British turf.

Legendary Derby winner Shergar

The Mathet-trained Vayrann tested positive, apparently for anabolic steroids, after passing the post first in the 1981 Champion Stakes, though the following June the Jockey Club finally allowed Vayrann to keep the race after the Aga Khan’s team had successfully proven that the substance for which he’d tested positive was present in small quantities in all male horses and had therefore been manufactured by Vayrann himself rather than being the result of foul play.

The outcome of the 1989 Oaks, in which the Aga Khan’s Stoute-trained filly Aliysa passed the post first, was an even more protracted affair but ultimately resulted – in November of the following year – with Aliysa being disqualified for testing positive for a metabolite of camphor. Two weeks later, the Aga Khan announced he would be removing his ninety or so horses trained in Britain. By the late-1990s, Stoute and Luca Cumani were training for the Aga Khan once more but again only temporarily as after 2006 his string was split only between French and Irish yards. The Aga Khan finally won the Oaks for the first time with the Dermot Weld-trained Ezeliya last year.

But both the Aga Khan’s Newmarket trainers provided him with Derby winners. Five years after Shergar, Stoute won the Derby again with Shahrastani, while in 1988 Luca Cumani was successful with Kahyasi from his first batch of Aga Khan horses. That year, the Aga Khan’s 2000 Guineas winner Doyoun (later sire of Daylami) carried his own colours in the Derby while apparent second string Kahyasi ran in the green and chocolate hoops that had belonged to his grandfather.

All five of the Aga Khan’s Epsom Derby winners went on to win the Irish Derby at the Curragh where in 2019 the Aga Khan unveiled the new stand that is named after him. His last two Derby winners were trained in Ireland. Harzand, trained by Weld, has been mentioned already and prior to him came the John Oxx-trained Sinndar in 2000, a top-class colt who not only followed up at the Curragh but went on to win the Arc as well. Oxx also trained the Aga Khan’s 2003 Irish Derby winner Alamshar who followed up in the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes, a race Azamour won for the same connections two years later.

The great Sinndar winning at Epsom

There had therefore been an 18-year gap between the Aga Khan’s first two Arc winners, Akiyda and Sinndar, but two more soon followed in the first decade of the current century, both of them also top-class three-year-olds. Like his sire Darshaan, Daylami’s half-brother Dalakhani had been one of his owner’s eight Prix du Jockey Club winners prior to winning the Arc in 2003. Also trained by Alain de Royer-Dupre, Zarkava ended an unbeaten career in the 2008 Arc having won both French fillies’ classics beforehand; she figures among the Aga Khan’s record seven winners of the Prix de Diane.

Zarkava, who achieved a Timeform rating of 133 which made her one of the best middle-distance fillies in Europe since the days of Petite Etoile, perhaps best embodies the continuity in the breeding programme the Aga Khan successfully managed for more than sixty years, an undertaking he described as ‘playing a game of chess with nature’. We have already seen how new bloodlines were introduced and that was inevitably counterbalanced by a constant ‘weeding out’ process of refining the most successful families which means that numerous good horses belonging to other owners can trace their origins back to Aga Khan families. By the same token, many a stoutly bred Aga Khan male cast-off has made a successful alternative career over jumps.

But the continuity of his best female lines was always considered of utmost importance by the Aga Khan. Zarkava is such a good example of that because she is a direct descendant of Petite Etoile, five generations back in her pedigree. Further back still, Petite Etoile’s fourth dam was the brilliant Mumtaz Mahal, ‘the fastest filly in the annals of the turf’ who was one of the foundation mares bought by the Aga Khan’s grandfather just over hundred years ago and is also the ancestress of Shergar among others.

Zarkava is herself perpetuating this continuity. Her granddaughter Zarigana (by Siyouni) looks a classic prospect herself after losing her unbeaten record by just a nose in last October’s Prix Marcel Boussac. The game of chess goes on, therefore, with the Aga Khan’s eldest daughter Princess Zahra, a successful owner in her own right since the first winner in her colours in France in 1996, looking the natural successor to her father who proved a Grandmaster in the breeding of top racehorses.

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