Walker Hancock talks about Annapolis, plus state of breeding industry
Fee reductions for homebreeders vs. commercial breeders are discussed
By Frances J. Karon
Ahead of the 1981 breeding season, Claiborne Farm’s then-president Seth Hancock was convinced by Woody Stephens to syndicate and stand Danzig, a brilliant, undefeated, but lightly raced son of Northern Dancer that Stephens had trained for Henryk de Kwiatkowski. History will attest that Danzig, who was not himself a stakes winner but sired 198 stakes winners—hitting at a rate of 18% stakes winners to foals—proved to be one of the greats. To this day, he’s a far-reaching global influence of class and male-line dominance through his sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons, and so on.
A year after Danzig passed away in 2006, Claiborne called up to stud his son War Front, a Grade 2-winning dirt sprinter. That’s an ongoing success story. The sire so far of 117 stakes winners, or 11% stakes winners to foals—the highest ratio among current stallions—War Front anchors the Claiborne roster and now has two sons standing alongside him: Classic winner War of Will, who has first 2-year-olds; and the farm’s newest stallion, Grade 1 winner Annapolis. Both horses were recruited by Seth’s son Walker, who took over the farm’s presidency a decade ago.
Annapolis and War of Will make it three generations of direct male-line ancestors to stand at Claiborne. That’s one fewer generation of Hancocks who have piloted the farm for more than 100 years.
Along with right-hand man Bernie Sams, the younger Hancock sat down with me at Claiborne on Monday after I’d gone to look at Annapolis. Like many folks in Kentucky, I’d watched Annapolis win his Grade 1 at Keeneland firsthand and liked what I’d seen that day.
Hancock and Sams are pretty excited, as you’d expect, about Annapolis, a 16.2-hand, unflappable 5-year-old who both men agree physically favors his broodmare sire, Unbridled’s Song. Size-wise, War Front is a smaller horse and very much a distinct Northern Dancer model.
Annapolis was foaled and raised at Claiborne, and he’s the second foal out of My Miss Sophia, who won the G2 Gazelle at Aqueduct by 7 1/4-lengths one start before running second to eventual 3-year-old champion filly Untapable (Tapit) in the G1 Kentucky Oaks. She’d sold for $4,000,000 while carrying Annapolis.
The colt debuted a 4 1/2-length winner at two over 1 1/16-miles on the turf at Saratoga a month before he won the G2 Pilgrim at Belmont. At three, Annapolis was first or second in five-of-six starts, all stakes, led by the G1 Coolmore Turf Mile at Keeneland, in which he beat older horses in a stakes record 1:33.29. In 2023 as a 4-year-old, he won a listed race Derby week at Churchill and was Grade 1-and Grade 3-placed.
ANNAPOLIS (2019 War Front – My Miss Sophia, by Unbridled’s Song)
B: Bass Stables, LLC
O: Bass Racing, LLC
T: Todd A. Pletcher
Record: 13-6-4-0, $1,581,770
Highest achievement: Grade 1 winner
Last Auction Price: none/$4,000,000 in utero at Keeneland November
The Annapolis retirement news came out in the first week of January, which is late as far as stallion retirement announcements go. It will be a bit of a challenge to market a new horse with many mares already committed elsewhere, but he’s priced right at $12,500—incidentally, this is the same fee at which War Front started, and he’s now a six-figure stud—and is a good-looking, well-bred, Grade 1 winner by a sire who’s had lesser sons succeed in the breeding shed.
Hancock is not worried by the late start. “Especially when they look like he does,” said Hancock. “When people come out and see him, of course they’re going to breed to him. To me, he’s built like a dirt horse. They”—“they” being owner/breeder Ramona Bass’s team of trainer Todd Pletcher and advisor Steve Young—“swore that he could run on dirt. Obviously we never saw it, but they were going to this year. It makes sense because he comes from a dirt family.”
“If you go back and look at the first crop of War Front and the stakes winners he had, there were quite a few dirt stakes winners,” Sams said. “He made his mark on the dirt starting out.” So, too, had Danzig.
Neither War Front nor Danzig even ran on the turf, but when both hit big in Europe, they became somewhat pigeon-holed as turf sires—and this is especially true for War Front. “Which is great,” said Hancock of War Front’s European successes. “It made him an international supersire. But it also made him a ‘turf sire.’”
When given the chance, War Front is more versatile than that. Omaha Beach won three dirt Grade 1s; War of Will, who is out of a Sadler’s Wells mare and from a very turfy family, is a Grade 1 winner on dirt—in the Preakness no less—and on the turf as well; The Factor won a Grade 1 on both dirt and all-weather; Peace and War is a dirt Grade 1 winner; Claiborne homebred Departing won three graded races on dirt and one graded race on turf; Soldat was a graded winner on dirt and turf; and Fire Away was a graded winner on dirt and a stakes winner on turf.
As a sire of sires, War Front’s best has been Declaration of War, who’s now in Japan and is one away from 50 lifetime stakes winners, with The Factor not far behind at 41. Eleven individual sons of War Front have gotten at least one Northern Hemisphere graded stakes winner apiece.
Claiborne is bullish on its War Front sons and is hopeful one or both will prove a worthy successor to their sire. War of Will’s first 2-year-olds include Our Souper Hero, a $650,000 colt out of Pappascat (Scat Daddy) purchased by Live Oak Plantation at the Saratoga yearling sale. Meanwhile, Annapolis is attracting a good mix of commercial breeders and homebreeders.
Homebreeders are woven into Claiborne’s long history, and the farm has strived to manage its stallions accordingly, with limited books and cherry-picked mares. But as has been the case with each generation of Hancock at the helm, the Claiborne that Walker Hancock runs has had to push the boundaries of tradition that the Claiborne established by his great-grandfather in 1910 was built upon.
The younger Hancock understands that there’s a precarious balance to be struck—between tradition and surviving in the age of mass commercialism of breeding racehorses—for a mostly breed-to-race-oriented farm and client-base.
So while I had them on the hook to chat about Annapolis, I asked them about the state of the breeding industry from their perspective.
It’s well known that Claiborne was a supporter of The Jockey Club’s stallion cap that collapsed two years ago. “Limit what you can do with the first-year horses,” said Sams. “And it doesn’t have to be 140. It can be another number, if everybody were to agree to it. But it’ll help spread those mares out and you won’t have everybody just congregate to the 15 freshman sires with nobody wanting the second- and third-year horses. And it’ll make the guys who couldn’t breed to the horse in the first year maybe breed to the horse in the second or third year. That’s what used to happen.”
Hancock said, “They used to breed 40 mares here. At one point, my dad had to jump to 60, 80 mares to stay competitive. Then he had to jump to 100. I feel like we’re just doing what we have to. In an ideal world, I think all stallions should breed 100 mares. That’d be perfect, but that’s not the reality anymore. In order to stay competitive, we’re just trying to inch up. We’re never going to lead the pack [numbers-wise], but we have to inch it up to stay competitive. I think we’re just trying to evolve and trying to stay competitive by going up a little more.”
“When I started here,” added Sams, “we went to a hundred and a quarter.”
“You had to ask dad permission to do that, didn’t you?”
“We talked about it. It might have been 115 at first, then it crept up to 125. Seth came in here one day in May when we had 135 mares or something to Flatter, and he said, ‘How many mares do you have booked to that horse?’ I just said, ‘Uhhh…’ and he said, ‘I don’t want any B.S.’ I said, ‘Yessir.’” Sams laughed. “Flatter bred his 125th mare the second week in May. He still had 10 more to go. Seth said, ‘I don’t want to do that next year,’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir. I understand.’”
Walker Hancock has had to stretch beyond that figure. Silver State—a son of Hard Spun and therefore a grandson of Danzig—has yearlings now, and he bred 171 mares his first year. “Claiborne hit a record,” said Sams of that number.
Consider this number: Danzig’s first crop consisted of 32 named foals. Thirty-two. They were born in 1982 and we’re still talking about this horse 40 years later. He didn’t need 150-foal crops to shape the breed; he averaged 45.79 foals per year. Among his first-crop highlights were champion 2-year-old male Chief’s Crown, two other Grade 1 winners, and a pair of Grade 2 winners; he was the leading sire of 2-year-olds overall, not only among the freshmen, with just 32 foals representing him. He led the U.S. general sires list from 1991-1993 and was prominent on the list many other times.
From the standpoints of the physical aspect of a stallion breeding a huge book of mares and the human/farm aspect of being equipped to handle four or more breeding sessions daily, Hancock said, “I know what it took to get Silver State to 171. I don’t understand how people breed more than that. I mean, I really don’t.
“It’s the commercial breeding operations that are why we find ourselves in this situation,” continued Hancock. “It’s because the market is so commercially driven. The notion is, ‘Well, I can’t sell a Runhappy for $500,000 anymore so I’m not going to breed to him.’ But they know they can get that with a first-year sire so they’re just going to go to him instead.”
The farm stands Runhappy (Super Saver), a champion sprinter, for $10,000. He’s the sire of 2023 Grade 1-winning 2-year-old Nutella Fella. His Grade 2 winner Smile Happy got to $1 million in earnings last year. Already in 2024, he’s represented by four stakes winners. One of those, Kinetic Sky, has earned $598,768, while Claiborne-bred Grade 3 winner Happy American—Grade 3-placed this year—has earned $632,716. Stakes winner Happy Soul, an earner of $528,218, stays in training. But, as Hancock said, “If you don’t have a big horse, it doesn’t matter.”
Sams said, “Stud fees have gotten so high. Would it help if you had a commercial stud fee and a breed-to-race stud fee? If a horse stands for $100,000, breed for $100,000 and go to a sale, or you can breed for $50,000 and race it.”
“And if you did sell, it’d be fine, you’d just owe the other fifty,” said Hancock.
“When you get up into those stallions that are $175,000-$200,000-plus, for a guy that breeds to race, because racing has become so expensive, just the day rate. It used to be $25,000 for one year and now it’s $60,000-$75,000, and then you put a $200,000 stud fee on top of it, oh my gosh, you’ve gotta be kidding,” Sams said. “It’s hard to recoup your investment. And maybe the less expensive horses you don’t need to do it with, but some of these horses that are in their second or third year, instead of cutting their fees in half, just say, ‘If you’re going to breed to race, you can breed for twenty as opposed to forty.’”
Now, that’s an idea I haven’t heard before, and it’s practical and innovative. It may even be the incentive that sparks more breeding to race.
It certainly warrants some consideration, doesn’t it?
I support the breeding to race stud fee! Thank you for this discussion.
Makes sense!