Good Morning Bloodstock: My Prospero & Al Riffa

Capital Stud is stacking its chips on sons of Wootton Bassett. The County Kilkenny operation this year launched the stallion career of wide-margin Challenge Stakes winner Topgear – whose debut book comprised 197 mares – and it has also now signed up recently retired three-time Group 1 hero Al Riffa as a dual-purpose option.

Capital Stud is really majoring on this line by also standing Group 2 winner and multiple Group 1 place-getter My Prospero, by Wootton Bassett’s sire Iffraaj, from 2027.

Al Riffa was bred by Haras d’Etreham, Benoit Chalmel, Cofinvest and Meridian International out of Love On My Mind, an unraced Galileo full-sister to dual Sagaro Stakes winner and Gold Cup runner-up Mizzou descended from Yorkshire Oaks heroine My Emma.

He was purchased by his trainer Joseph O’Brien for 150,000gns from Book 1 of the Tattersalls October Yearling Sale.

Al Riffa was sent out by O’Brien to win the National Stakes at two and to finish a close second to Ace Impact in the Prix Guillaume d’Ornano at three. He took the Grosser Preis von Berlin by five lengths and was runner-up to City Of Troy in the Eclipse at four, and was an easy winner of the Curragh Cup and Irish St Leger at five. 

He had finished third in both the Prix Vicomtesse Vigier and Curragh Cup this year at six, and was being prepared for another tilt at the Melbourne Cup, in which he finished seventh off top weight last year, but was retired last month due to a suspensory injury.

O’Brien said then about his stable stalwart, who has earned more than £1.4 million in prize-money: “He's been a great horse for us over a number of seasons. He's been so consistent at a high level under all types of conditions. You could set your clock by him every year to turn up at the top level."

Darragh McCarthy, head of nominations at Capital Stud, adds to that by saying: “Al Riffa is a horse we’d been following since he won the Irish St Leger. We thought he was an interesting National Hunt prospect, so we put our name in the hat for him and kept an eye on his career and, luckily enough, it transpired recently that we would be able to buy him. We’re over the moon to have secured him.

“He’s a gorgeous, big, black horse who stands at 16.3 hands and has a huge walk.

“After he won the National Stakes Joseph said publicly that he was the best two-year-old he’d ever trained. Joseph has obviously had some other candidates for that accolade since then, but it shows that he held him in extremely high regard. 

“It would be very hard to find another horse who did what he did: win a Group 1 over seven furlongs as a two-year-old and then also a St Leger. I’d say Nijinsky might be the only one to have done that in living memory. It’s an incredibly rare thing to do.”

The Wootton Bassett sire-line hasn’t been tried much in jumps breeding yet but McCarthy believes that it will work in that sphere. 

“It’s something different but that could be a good thing,” he says. “He’s an outcross for most National Hunt mares and Ireland probably needs an injection of new blood every now and again. Look at Jeremy, by Danehill Dancer, or Poet’s Word, by Poet’s Voice.

“Wootton Bassett gets horses on the Flat who stayed a lot further than he did in his own racing career, so stamina shouldn’t be a problem, and he was an exceptionally strong influence for good looks, so that should play well with commercial breeders.”

The Capital Stud team won’t be limiting Al Riffa’s sights to jumps breeding, though.

“He’ll cover predominantly National Hunt mares, I’m sure,” says McCarthy. “But when you look at results from the yearling sales in the last week you see that there’s a real appetite among buyers for a middle-distance horse, and rightly so.

“Of course, the irony is that some of the biggest studs in Ireland had tried to buy the horse after he won the National Stakes and throughout his three-year-old season. If they’d succeeded and retired him then he’d have been considered a Flat sire anyway.”

Capital Stud is also expecting Al Riffa (pictured below) to pick up a good bit of business from France, and not just because he always ran well on his cross-Channel assignments.  

“We’ve been doing a good bit of business with French breeders,” says McCarthy. “It started spontaneously, when Thierry Cypres of Haras de Cercy came to look at Mirage Dancer and decided he loved him so much that he had to buy two breeding rights in him, so sent him six mares in his first year and a similar number in his second. 

“That worked out brilliantly and so we’ve worked hard to keep it going, by forging relationships with people like Nicky Bertran de Balanda and Sebastien Desmontils, who have big followings in France for both codes. We’ve had a lot of French mares come for all the stallions, and Topgear received about 20 on his own this year.”

My Prospero, who won the Prix Eugene Adam and Winter Hill Stakes and finished third in the St James’s Palace Stakes and Champion Stakes for the Tsui family’s Sunderland Holding, also has a French connection as he has spent the first two years of his stallion career at Haras des Faunes near Bordeaux. 

“I clearly remember the first time he came across my radar,” says McCarthy. “Jerry Horan and I saw him parading for the St James’s Palace Stakes at Royal Ascot and we both thought that he was one of the best-looking horses we’d ever seen on a racecourse. 

“He was a brilliant performer on his day too, and was there or thereabouts in a heap of very important Group 1s. He was beaten only a head and a short-head in the St James’s Palace Stakes and finished one place ahead of Baaeed in the Champion Stakes on his first start after an injury.

"He’d injured his back by slipping after crossing the line when he won his Group 2 in France and William Haggas said that if the horse had enjoyed an uninterrupted passage to the Champion Stakes he probably would have won it.

“So, when it looked like My Prospero might be retiring, we enquired about standing him but Mrs Tsui wanted him to go to stand alongside Galileo and Sea The Stars’ half-brother Born To Sea, which was fair enough. But we kept in contact and this year Suzanne Roberts [who manages Mrs Tsui’s bloodstock interests] contacted us to say that they would be open to bringing him to Ireland after all.”

My Prospero is from a family buzzing with relevance. He is out of My Titania, a member of Sea The Stars’ first crop who won the CL Weld Park Stakes at two, which makes him a half-brother to black-type winners and Group 1 runners-up My Oberon and My Astra.

A Night Of Thunder colt out of My Astra became the most expensive yearling colt ever sold in Europe when knocked down to Godolphin for 4,600,000gns at Book 1 of the Tattersalls October Yearling Sale this month. The Too Darn Hot half-brother to My Prospero and co was bought by Rabbah Bloodstock for 625,000gns at the same sale. 

“My Prospero has a lot of Sea The Stars about him,” says McCarthy. “He’s a beautiful horse to look at and some walker. I think when breeders in Ireland see him they’ll find it very easy to visualise him producing a fine, big, scopey Sea The Stars-like foal.”

McCarthy adds that the Capital Stud team will likely be supporting their new recruits’ stock at the sales. 

“We’ve done the same with every stallion we’ve had so far,” he continues. “We’ve bought a lot to put in training over the years and even when we haven’t ended up buying them we’ve underbid them. It’s all a help.

“We do that at both ends of the market too. We’ve bought plenty of cheaper horses by some of the more commercial sires to get them into the system, to help get them going.

“At the end of the day, we believe that if our clients produce a nice foal, they deserve to get a return.”

Al Riffa and My Prospero join Authorized, Martinborough, Mirage Dancer, Topgear and Castle Star on the Capital Stud roster. 

We can’t let McCarthy go without a word on the amazing Authorized, who this year equalled the record for number of Grand Nationals won by his progeny when I Am Maximus joined Tiger Roll in becoming a dual scorer in the Aintree showpiece. 

“He’s in good order but he’s becoming more and more difficult to breed with,” he says. “We won’t be giving him the hard sell next year, we’ll just say he’s available if people want to use him. 

"It’s very difficult seeing people come from all over the country with their prized mare and having to go away disappointed as he’s refused to cover them. 

“He has about 20 mares in foal this year and he’s got some very nice foals selling in the National Hunt sales at Tattersalls Ireland in November and Goffs in December. Breeders will hopefully get well paid for them as they're becoming a real precious commodity.”