by Miodrag Milovanovic ©

If someone want to analyze the current state of the world's best horse breeding there are two logical ways to do that. One is to chose top horses from the International Classification and the other is to analyze world Group/Grade 1 winners. We've taken this second approach beliving that it is less concentrated to certain countries and offers wider scale, even if some good horses are excluded because they couldn't managed to win a Group/Grade 1 race.

Races in every country that has organized horse racing have been divided into class/quality categories, but, of course, there are differences in quality between countries, so Group designators were introduced in 1971 to highlight world's best races. That system became applicable in British, French, Irish and Italian races, with German racing joining up the next year. Similar Grade designators were introduced in 1973 in the U.S.A. and Canada.

The International Cataloguing Standards Commitee accepted this system and now it is internationally acclaimed. This body divided countries in three sections. Section One includes the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Peru, South Africa, and United States of America and winners of G1 races in those countries are accepted internationally as G1 winners. Also, a few races from following countries are accepted as G1 races: Hong Kong, Japan, and United Arab Emirates.

For our analyses we've included G1 winners from all these countries except Chile, Peru and South Africa because of problems of finding the pedigrees of all winners. Also, because of the emerging quality of races in Japan, for completeness of our analysis we've included G1 races in that country as graded by the Japan Association for International Horse Races.

Races

As we said, quality of G1 races differs from country to country. For example, in Europe, handicap races are excluded from the list, which is not the case in most other coutries. That is why winning a G1 race in Europe could signal more to breeders than in other parts of world.

On the other hand, there are emerging questions that criteria for G1 races in Europe are degrading. When one looks at the number of G3, G2 and G1 races it is evident that a natural pyramidal structure is lost, so now there are only three more races at the G2 level than in the G1 category. Maybe it is true that quality is more concentrated in Europe, but the following table for countries included in our research shows that there is great difference between percent of G1 races between Europe and other countries:

This table shows that in some countries like New Zealand and Argentina number of G1 races is greater than it could be expected.

Horses

The total number of analysed G1 races is 374. There are 280 different winners of these races. Horses with greatest number of wins are:

Sires and Broodmare Sires

These 280 horses were sired by 200 different sires and 215 broodmare sires. Sires with greatest number of winners (more than 3) are:

Dual serving Danehill (Danzig) leads the sire list with 10 individual winners. This year he achived unique succes: he was a leading sire in both hemispheres (France and Australia). Six of his winners were from Australia and four are from Northern Hemisphere. It is interesting that his two dual G1 winning horses - Mozart (IRE) and Magical Miss (AUS) are out of mares from the same 1983 generation sired by Spectacular Bid. Another G1 winner - Janet (GB) is made out of a similar combination - Emperor Jones (Danzig)/Spectacular Bid mare.

The well known cross of Sadler's Wells/Shirley Heights is continuing to produce good horses (Subtle Power) together with what seems an even more promising cross, Sadler's Wells/Darshaan (by Shirley Heights) with 3 G1 winners this year (Milan, High Chaparral, Quarter Moon).

Foundation Sires

The situation in regards to preserving the Byerley Turk and Godolphin Arabian sire lines is pretty grim. The following table shows that only about 5% of the world's top horses are from these two sirelines.

At this moment it looks like that only Relaunch (Godolphin Arabian sireline) and his sons and grandsons represent continuing top world class, with more or less accidental winner coming from other sires from these sirelines.

Modern Sirelines

Taking a step ahead, and looking at more recent branches of the dominant Darley Arabian sireline there is evident dominance of the Northern Dancer sireline with more than one third of all G1 winners sired by his descendants.

Female families

Distribution of G1 winners according to the Bruce Lowe's female families is following:

Family #1 is still family with greatest number of G1 winners - 37. Branch 1-s (Web) with 9 individual winners is most prominent branch. In this branch, seven (Mozart (IRE), Officer (USA), Tali'sluckybusride (USA), Scorpion (USA), Tweedside (USA), Coray (BRZ) and Redattore (USA)) are descendants of the famous La Troienne.

Family #9 is very close with 33 individual G1 winners. Branch 9-c (Crab mare) with 10 winners is most prominent in this branch with 9 of this winners descendants of Lady Josephine. Her daughter Lady Juror is responsible for Curata Storm (AUS) and Golden Snake (USA). The other six are from Lady Josephine's other famous daughter, Mumtaz Mahal - Ameerat (GB), Left Bank (USA), Choc Ice (IRE), Morshdi (GB), Quarter Moon (IRE), Viscoun (AUS), Viking Ruler (AUS). The last two are descendants of the famous mare Eight Carat. Branch 9-f (Toxophilite Mare) with nine G1 winners is also very prominent with four of these winners - Aptitude (USA), Numerous Times (CAN), To The Victory (JPN), Victory Ride (USA) - descending from Affection (FR-1914).

Inbreeding

In this article we will use term "inbred" for horses that have same ancestor up to fifth generation. 58 out of the 280 G1 winning horses, or 20.71% are not inbred to the fifth generation. The closest inbreeding (2x3 to Northern Dancer) shows up in Skimming (USA) by Nureyev. Two horses are inbred 2x4 and 7 horses are inbred 3x3.

To show which horses most frequently appears in pedigree of G1 horses up to fifth generation we've counted number of appearances for every horse weighted by position in the pedigree where inbreeding occurs (5th generation 1 point, 4th generation 2 points, 3rd generation 4 points and 2nd generation 8 points). For example: when horse appears in inbreed 3x4 he receives 6 points, 2x4 - 10 points etc. The results are following:

Sire and Dam Age

We've also analyzed age of sire and mare at the year of foaling.

158 out of 280 horses has their sire older than their dam, in 101, the dam was older than the sire, and 20 horses had parents of exactly the same age. It is possible to compare this data with data in the article Aging and Genetic Deterioration by Jay Leimbach, bearing in mind that in his article ages are given at year of conception.

February 3, 2002. Copyright by Miodrag Milovanovic 2002.