John Ingles looks at the pedigree of the Eclipse and Irish Champion Stakes winner ahead of his new career as a Coolmore stallion.
Big-money purchases are nothing new for Coolmore, of course, but even by their standards eight million dollars represents a significant outlay on an individual horse. That was the sum M. V. Magnier paid for six-year-old mare Tepin at a record-breaking session of the Fasig-Tipton November Sale in 2017.
‘It’s a lot of money’ said Magnier at the time, with a degree of understatement, ‘but she’s an excellent racehorse. She’s very good-looking. She was a good two-year-old and she was good up to the age of five. It’s a lot of money but Mark Casse did an unbelievable job with her through her career.’
That career brought Tepin 13 wins from 23 starts, and while she was a Grade 3 winner on dirt at two, she really came into her own once switched to the turf. Aged four and five, she won five Grade 1 contests in North America, notably the 2015 Breeders’ Cup Mile at Keeneland where David O’Meara’s Mondialiste chased her home.
But Tepin proved herself at the top level at a mile in Europe too, because the following season she was sent to Royal Ascot for the Queen Anne Stakes. Mondialiste was down the field this time and it was the Lockinge winner Belardo who ran Tepin closest, though racing on a straight track for the first time she won smoothly enough by half a length (replay below).
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The Breeders’ Cup Mile and the Queen Anne featured in an eight-race winning streak for Tepin who ended her career finishing second in a bid to retain her Breeders’ Cup Mile title. With a Timeform rating of 124, Tepin was twice named US champion turf female, and if all that didn’t make her an outstanding broodmare prospect, she was in foal to leading US sire Curlin when Coolmore snapped her up.
Sadly, Tepin had an all-too-brief career as a broodmare, producing just four foals before she died aged 12 in 2023. Neither the Curlin filly she had been carrying, nor her second foal, a filly by Galileo named Swirl, ever reached the racecourse, but in the last couple of seasons her two subsequent foals have both become Group 1 winners, providing Coolmore with a posthumous return on that considerable investment.
In fact, to leave behind a Group 1-winning daughter by Galileo and a Group 1-winning son by Dubawi could hardly have been a better legacy as far as Coolmore were concerned. When three-year-old Grateful won the Prix de Royallieu on Arc weekend last October, she became one of Galileo’s very last Group/Grade 1 winners. Just a week later, her two-year-old half-brother Delacroix won the Autumn Stakes at Newmarket, and while things didn’t work out for him when he was sent off favourite for the Derby, he retires to stud a dual Group 1 winner after victories in the Eclipse (replay below) and Irish Champion Stakes.
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Discover Sporting Life Plus BenefitsAs must be pretty well known by now, Dubawi has yet to sire a Derby winner, but Delacroix was his third winner of the Eclipse, following Al Kazeem in 2013 and Ghaiyyath in 2020, both of whom won the race as five-year-olds.
Ghaiyyath has the highest Timeform rating (133) of any of Dubawi’s runners, with Postponed and Makfi (both 130) the only others with a higher rating than Delacroix on 129. Dubawi is also responsible for champion sire elect Night of Thunder, the sire of Delacroix’s arch rival Ombudsman who turned the tables on him in the Juddmonte International after Delacroix’s dramatic late swoop denied Ombudsman at Sandown.
Speaking in the winner’s enclosure after the Eclipse, Aidan O’Brien clearly had Delacroix’s longer-term significance to Coolmore in mind as much as where he might run next, stressing how valuable a son of Dubawi would be to the operation.
While Delacroix’s dam had an all-American pedigree, O’Brien would have been very familiar with both Tepin's sire Bernstein and her dam’s sire Stravinsky. He trained both of them, and while the smart Bernstein was found wanting in Group 1 company, that wasn’t the case with Stravinsky who proved top class when his trainer dropped him back to sprinting, winning the July Cup and Nunthorpe.
Delacroix’s pedigree makes him a suitable match for a variety of Coolmore broodmares in the future, whether they’re by Galileo or their current hot stallions Wootton Bassett and Justify. Wootton Bassett’s recent death only serves to make Delacroix an even more important addition to Coolmore’s stallion roster.
The fact that Delacroix is by Darley’s flagship stallion is a story in itself and something that would have been inconceivable in the not-too-distant past. After a period when Coolmore and Darley made a point of not using each other’s stallions or buying their offspring, relations between the two superpowers thawed to the extent that Coolmore sent an elite batch of their broodmares to be covered by Dubawi in 2018.
No superstars emerged from that particular crop, but in Delacroix Coolmore had a high-class colt sired by their rivals' best stallion and who could now prove key to their success for seasons to come as a sire.
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