2000 Guineas: Fighting on the Front line

The unbeaten and unbeatable Frankel was 2/1-on when winning the 2000 Guineas in 2011, and as this year’s renewal looms Air Force Blue is edging ever nearer the same price. He’s not unbeaten but the vibes are he’s unbeatable, at least as far as Newmarket is concerned.

American Pharoah was unbeatable, too. Well, unbeatable bar that once, at Saratoga, which lived up to its ghoulish tag of the ‘Graveyard of Champions’. Myths are often manufactured, isolating the facts that matter rather than dealing in matters of fact, and anyone watching the Punchestown Festival this week, where the Davids have run amok against the Goliaths, knows that there’s far more to the strewn bodies of floored favourites than the assault course they’re running on.

The Saratoga folklore became fake-law in 1973, in the Whitney Stakes, when the illustrious Secretariat was humbled by Onion and the world made a little less sense. One legend succumbed that day but two others were installed, that of Saratoga as a cemetery and Onion’s trainer as the ‘Giant Killer’.

Lightning struck twice as H. Allen Jerkens masterminded another defeat of Secretariat in September of that season, with Prove Out in the Woodward Stakes at Belmont, and two years later he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, then the youngest trainer to receive the honour.

Jerkens was renowned for doing things unconventionally, no stone left unturned nor horse turned inside out. He died last year, aged 85, but was still setting trends and upsetting odds in big races as recently as 2007. In May that year, in the space of ten days, he tipped over Graded apple carts at Belmont with both Teammate and Ecclesiastic, half-siblings who were reinvented by Jerkens time and again.

The trainer’s avant-garde approach, and the fact that Ecclesiastic was a 10 lb better horse on turf, following dam Starry Dreamer’s lead, makes it slightly surprising that another of the siblings, under Jerkens’ tutelage, raced only on dirt in his 13-race career, like a clay-court clubber that never got a swing at Wimbledon. But any magic wasn’t lost, instead it was passed on, and one of the bountiful beneficiaries stands on the brink of stardom in the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket on Saturday.

War Front was a bit too good on dirt to ever be moved onto turf, according to Marc Attenberg, commander-in-chief at Timeform US, who called it ‘a mild version of the Cigar phenomenon.’ As a three-year-old, racing on grass from his third start onwards, Cigar chipped away and paid his way, but it was only when he got down and dirty that he went from Bruce Banner to The Incredible Hulk and won sixteen in a row.

In fairness, War Front was better on dirt than Cigar had been on turf, finishing second in two Grade 1s, over 6f and 7f, in the green-and-white silks of owner-breeder Joseph Allen, who subsequently stationed him at Claiborne Farm. That’s his racing story, the rest is racing history.

‘When he came to the farm you could never have dreamt he’d turn out the way he is,’ says Bernie Sams, bloodstock manager at Claiborne.  ‘We all liked him, and he showed on the track he had plenty of speed, so you thought he could make a good sire and we took a chance, but what he’s doing is pretty remarkable.’

Actions speak louder than words, and War Front’s publicity is not in the written or spoken word but in the actions of his prodigious progeny, around the world, to the extent that the equine supermodels are queuing up. ‘At this point I don’t have to do much quality control with who visits him,’ says Sams, ‘because we’re in the position we can pick and choose; in fact, what’s hardest is trying to figure out having enough seasons to get round all the people that want to breed to him.

‘He would probably breed as good a book of mares as any horse in the world this year.’

Breeding is the generation game, of bringing forth and multiplying the supreme genes, bloodlines becoming battle lines in the race to be top of the crops, the past powering the present and framing the future, and Bernie Sams is in no doubt as to what, or more to the point who, is the secret to War Front’s stallion success:

‘He’s Danzig - he’s just like his father. He looks more like him than any sons of Danzig that retired by the time we got going with War Front. And everyone’s kind of jumped on his sons now.’

Two of those stallion sons, War Command and Declaration of War, the former at Coolmore currently and the latter having passed through there en route to Australia and then Coolmore’s Kentucky base, were the game-changers for War Front on the European scene, when both won on the same day at Royal Ascot in 2013. Right there, right then, it was a case of the star War’s force awakens.

Access to that specific strand of the Danzig line is part of the reason the brains of Coolmore and the brawn of Ballydoyle have thrown their considerable weight behind War Front. Besides the aforementioned Wars of Declaration and Command, Aidan O’Brien has trained several other Group winners by War Front, including Hit It A Bomb, whose explosion in the Juvenile Turf was one of the moments of last year’s Breeders’ Cup.

Breeds succeed breeds and success breeds success, and naturally there’s the highest premium on the highest achievers, War Front’s fee at $200,000 for 2016. For superpower spending, it’s millions to get that one, but Air Force Blue looks that one in a million.

Power and pace is where it’s at in the bloodstock industry, but Bernie Sams identified two different, defiant qualities connected to War Front’s stock – ‘they’re tough and they’re durable’ – and Air Force Blue scored as highly on that as on the class count as a two-year-old. From May to October, starting as the stable’s first debut winner of the season and ending as the highest-rated juvenile O’Brien has ever trained, according to Timeform and, quintessentially, the man himself, Air Force Blue looked more formidable with each of his five races, and the experience he gained was far more valuable than the unbeaten record he lost when overturned by Buratino at Royal Ascot on the second of them, a score he settled on his very next start on his way to a Group 1 hat-trick.

Air Force Blue is so far ahead of his contemporaries that he could win the 2000 Guineas with his legs tied, or his tongue tied for that matter, the equipment an unforeseen measure but not an alarm bell, given the instinctive genius of his trainer, Aidan O’Brien from the H. Allen Jerkens school of deep thought.

O’Brien gave it deep thought the one and only time I asked him a question, in a scrum on a media day at Ballydoyle ahead of Australia’s Derby win. ‘Would you like to train a Frankel offspring?’

‘Listen,’ he replied, ticking that obligatory box before pausing to appraise his answer, metaphorically swapping his Ballydoyle cap for a Coolmore one. ‘Frankel was an amazing racehorse, but I suppose I’d say why go to the son when we’ve got the source here.’

Galileo is 18 this year, and the search is on to find the new blood, the next big thing. When Frankel scorched the turf in the Guineas, at 2/1-on, it was the beginning of his legacy and the crowning of Galileo’s. Air Force Blue is nearly there, 2/1-on that is, and War Front is waiting, the king in waiting.