- This topic has 17 replies, 11 voices, and was last updated 14 years, 5 months ago by
.
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http://www.sportinglife.com/racing/news … ml&BID=465
No surprise here. Getting away from the “like him” / “don’t like him” debate, I wonder if his damp squib of a season in 2011 (and failure to win another Group 1) will do something to discourage owner/breeders from racing highly successful 3yo’s at 4?
Interesting he’s standing in Japan not the UK. They can’t rate him that highly or they think because he got more than a mile he will end up serving hunter mares.
Breeding industry is crazy the racehorse is getting weaker & weaker as a breed.I think that his chances this year cannot have been helped by the form generally of Sir Michael Stoute’s yard.
I concur Crepello we seem to have become like the Americans with this obsession with speed. Stamina is nowadays becoming a dirty word.
Sad really.- Total Posts 17716
I disagree with the doomsday scenarios. Our top stallions at the moment are
Montjeu
and
Galileo
– neither of whom majors on precocity, and both of whom are siring their best offspring for classic middle-distances. Coolmore have taken Europe away from the American short-running trend, rather than enhanced its ascendancy.
And – given the dominance of
Montjeu
and
Galileo
as middle-distance sires –
Workforce
will have a better chance of achieving success (as well as potentially earning much, much more money) in the lucrative Japanese market. It’s not as if Japan’s breeding operations are in any way second-class nowadays: their stock is in general terms a match for any other country on the planet.
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Damn shame, in my eyes, as he never got to realise the potential connections obviously saw in him at the end of his 3yo season.
Would guess he never recovered from the injury he picked up in the King George though, given the hiatus since the Arc, his sporting owner appears to have tried his best to resurrect him for a 5yo career.
Would’ve walked all over Nathaniel in the KG had he been right, imo. but sadly retires underrated, while his conquerer gets plaudits he never earned or deserved.I wish them well with the breeding but honestly?
For a horse who won both the Derby and the Arc he failed to grab the imagination.
I see him as an instantly forgettable horse who’s name will rarely be part of future discussions unless he does well at stud.
Strange old career had Workforce.
I’m not at all sure what I thought about him to be honest. He looked fantastic at Epsom and Longchamp but no more than decent in the remainder of his races. And when you look at the fields for that Derby and Arc it makes you wonder if he wasn’t perhaps given more status than his performances warranted.
He didn’t have many races, did he? And he ran very strangely in the race before the Derby. Obviously not an easy horse to train and will perhAPs be remembered as a great training performance by Sir M. Not sure about his pedigree [the horses; not the trainers]; just going to look it up. Some good horses have ended up in Japan, my beloved Sunday Silence being one of them.
Problem is that Europe is putting all its eggs in one basket. The only non-Northern Dancer or Raise a Native line stallion at Coolmore is Vinnie Roe, and he’s relegated to the jumpers.
Workforce is Kingmambo (Raise a Native/Northern Dancer) over Sadler’s Wells (Northern Dancer). Not a lot of variety there.He didn’t have many races, did he?
You could say that about most young stallions these days.
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He didn’t have many races, did he? And he ran very strangely in the race before the Derby. Obviously not an easy horse to train and will perhAPs be remembered as a great training performance by Sir M. Not sure about his pedigree [the horses; not the trainers]; just going to look it up. Some good horses have ended up in Japan, my beloved Sunday Silence being one of them.
In the
Dante
the bit slipped through his mouth, otherwise he would quite possibly have beaten
Cape Blanco
. And there were excuses made after this year’s
King George
too.
But I’m not even sure I would go along with your general thesis about a "great training performance". Although I yield to nobody in my admiration for Sir Michael, I do wonder whether he was ideally prepared for those two
King Georges
.
This is a mere opinion: but it may be that Stoute, with a view to the Arc, thought he could get away with having Workforce a notch less than cherry-ripe both in 2010 and 2011: and those two defeats dented his reputation, I think, more than last month’s attempt to repeat his Arc victory, when he ran too badly for it to be true.
While Workforce was not the worst Derby winner, he certainly beat the poorest field I have seen in the last 25 years. At the end of the day his race record shows he was inconsistent. I do not think it was a physical injury that ruined him, but the way So You Think defeated him in the Eclipse, from then on, his resolution was questionable.
Being by King’s Best was always going to present a problem standing him in UK/Ireland as he is now being recognized as a good stallion for NH purposes and despite his relatively high fee (£15,000) for that sphere, I’m sure his fee will come down to attract more stoutely bred mares. Japan will offer him chances he simply would not get here.Never really took to Workforce as a horse despite the Derby/Arc double which should earn automatic respect. Somehow, for me, it didn’t with him.
This year was one long mumble of explanations and apolgies and even in his annus mirabilis excuses were made in half his races.
To my eye Nathaniel had him totally cooked at Ascot before he started to hang and I think the Gosden horse may end his career with a taller reputation than Workforce.Good luck to him at stud in Japan.
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Shabby
Workforce was travelling all over Nathaniel until just after Rewilding ran into the back of him, and Nathaniel showed just how good he isn’t subsequently when finishing 2l further behind SYT than Workforce had.
Nathaniel is already rated the higher (a complete travesty) – I have sincere doubts he will ever live up to it.
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