Flightline slams his rivals at Keeneland (image courtesy of Breeders' Cup)

Why Flightline needs to hit the ground running in his stallion career

By John Ingles

Horse Racing

Mon November 14, 2022 · 3y ago

With Breeders' Cup Classic winner Flightline's stud fee announced at $200,000, John Ingles compares how similarly-priced stallions have fared.

Flightline’s racing career was so brief that he didn’t even get his full quota of fifteen minutes of fame – his six races and six wins were wrapped up in a total time spent racing of not much more than nine minutes.

But he certainly made the most of his limited time on the track, posting his first top-class performance on just his third start when winning his first Grade 1 race, the Malibu Stakes at Santa Anita late last year, and recording three more impressive Grade 1 wins this season in the Metropolitan Handicap, the Pacific Classic and the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

It was his astonishing display in the Pacific Classic at Del Mar in September, where he won easing down by more than 19 lengths from the Dubai World Cup winner Country Grammer, which earned Flightline his exceptional Timeform rating of 143 and put him in the same bracket as the very best horses that Timeform has rated on turf in Europe.

That performance also gave Flightline top billing at the Breeders’ Cup where he wasn’t quite as spectacular but signed off his career with another outstanding effort to win the Classic by a record margin of eight and a quarter lengths.

READ: Ben Linfoot reacts to Breeders' Cup Saturday

Despite racing only six times, Flightline’s lucrative wins meant he became a rare example of a million-dollar yearling more than recouping his purchase price – he won just over four and a half times that amount in prize money. But Flightline’s earnings from the track are a mere fraction of his current value as a stallion. Some indication of his current worth came last week when a one-off 2.5% share in Flightline was sold for $4.6m.

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that Coolmore were heavily involved in the bidding, though they finished up as underbidders to an unnamed owner from Seattle, apparently ‘with interests in the coffee business’.

Multiplying that share by forty in theory places a total valuation on Flightline of $184m, though the rarity value of that single share was obviously a factor in the inflated amount it sold for. What we know for sure is that Flightline’s opening fee has been set at $200,000 – about £170,000 at current conversion rates – when he starts covering his first book of mares at Lane’s End Farm next year. That’s the same as Quality Road who commands much the highest fee among Lane’s End’s existing stallions.

With a Timeform rating of 131, Quality Road was a top-class performer whose Grade 1 wins included the Metropolitan Handicap, like Flightline, and he too ended his racing career in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, though in contrasting fashion, finishing last in a renewal at Churchill Downs best remembered for Zenyatta’s defeat to Blame. Quality Road began his stallion career at $35,000 and has worked his way up to his current fee by virtue of his success in his second career.

The most expensive stallion standing in North America in 2022 was Into Mischief whose fee hit a new career-high of $250,000 after becoming champion sire in North America for the third year running in 2021. Although a Grade 1 winner at two, Into Mischief is another who has hauled himself up from a much lower starting point, having stood for as little as $7,500 at one stage early in his stallion career. As well as the 2020 Kentucky Derby and Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Authentic, another of Into Mischief’s best horses is Life Is Good who was the only horse to give Flightline much of a race in the latest Breeders’ Cup Classic before fading into fifth.

Flightline’s opening stud fee puts him above his own sire Tapit who stands for $185,000 these days. Another former triple champion sire in North America, Tapit began his stallion career at a fee of just $15,000 before hitting a peak of $300,000 between 2015 and 2018.

Quality Road, Into Mischief and Tapit are all very good examples, therefore, of stallions who, despite being Grade 1 winners themselves, have forged their reputations from the bottom up rather than arriving at stud, as Flightline does, with a ‘ready-made’ six-figure fee and, no doubt, a book of mares to match.

The most recent newcomer to the North American stallion ranks to command a $200,000 fee before Flightline was American Pharoah. Retired at the end of his three-year-old season in 2015, American Pharoah had a more ‘classic’ US career than Flightline as he not only contested the Triple Crown but became the first horse to win all three races since Affirmed in 1978. On top of that, American Pharoah ended his career with his very best performance in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, winning it by six and a half lengths and earning a Timeform rating of 138.

With four crops of racing age, American Pharoah has sired six Group/Grade 1 winners to date, including the Joseph O’Brien-trained Above The Curve who won the Prix Saint-Alary at Longchamp this year. But with American Pharoah yet to sire a genuine top-notcher (his highest rated winner is the 121-rated mare As Times Goes By, successful in the Beholder Mile at Santa Anita in March), it hasn’t taken long for his fee to fall and it has been cut again for next year when he’ll be standing for only $60,000.

Going back a bit further, the 2004 Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Ghostzapper also started out at a fee of $200,000. Like American Pharoah, Ghostzapper was beaten only twice in eleven starts, though his career was a bit more like Flightline’s in that he started out over shorter trips and won the Classic as a four-year-old, though was retired due to injury after putting up another top-class effort to win the Metropolitan Handicap at five.

The story of Ghostzapper’s stud fee is another case of ‘the higher they start, the further they have to fall’. In just his sixth season at stud (so with just one crop of three-year-olds by then), his fee had plummeted to $20,000, a tenth of what he started out at. But another lesson to be learned from Ghostzapper’s stud career is that while it doesn’t take long for a red-hot stallion prospect to cool down if he doesn’t deliver the goods straight away, that doesn’t mean that he won’t prove more of a success in the longer term.

Ghostzapper, who will turn 23 next year, has now sired a dozen Grade 1 winners in the course of his career, and while he might not have lived up to his initial fee, it gradually recovered to hit a more recent and realistic high of $85,000 and he’ll be standing for $75,000 again next year. Ghostzapper’s highest-rated horse didn’t come along until last year, when Mystic Guide earned a rating of 127 for winning the Dubai World Cup, while another of his best horses is Goodnight Olive (rated 125), winner of the Filly And Mare Sprint at the latest Breeders’ Cup.

American Pharoah and Ghostzapper are therefore rather daunting examples of the trend Flightline will need to buck if he’s to maintain his massive opening fee. But his newest shareholder and the rest of his owners can look across the Atlantic for a more encouraging precedent of a colt who did manage to maintain the momentum of an outstanding racing career into a new life as a stallion. Having started out at an opening fee of £125,000, Frankel will be covering at another new high of £275,000 next season.

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