Weekend Preview: Silence still echoing on Sunday

He was a matter of months old when contracting an intestinal infection so severe that the vet, who had to feed him intravenously, thought he’d die. He barely attracted a bid at various sales, and John Gosden, on viewing him for a second time, tore his page out of the catalogue and sent it to the breeder with the handwritten note ‘even worse.’ On the way back from that particular auction in California, the driver of the horse box had a fatal heart attack, crashing off the road and tipping over, meaning more extensive medical treatment for a horse who seemed cursed.

He wasn’t. He was Sunday Silence. And he’s as relevant this Sunday as the Sunday in August that he died in 2002, aged 16.

‘At 16 years of age, normally one would expect to look forward to many more years of active service. It's terribly unfortunate. I think it is not only a great loss to the Japanese breeding industry but to the entire world of racing. From here on, I will endeavour to see that the great number of offspring that Sunday Silence has left behind will carry his blood forth for many generations to come.’

Teruya Yoshida, one of the brothers who built up Shadai Stallion Station, from where Sunday Silence ruled Japan and influenced the wider world, has made good on his pledge, as here we are, fifteen years and several generations on, and the Sunday Silence DNA is part of the propulsive power behind the main faces in the main races this Sunday.

On Timeform ratings, six of the top fourteen two-year-olds in Europe are fillies, and two of them, both unbeaten in and out of Royal Ascot, are aiming for new altitudes this weekend on their faultless flight path. They’re tied up, and tied together, by a chromosome bow inherited from Sunday Silence, but their gifts are different, as is the package, Different League a surprise package, but also a more complete package than September.

Fast-tracking runs in the French provinces honed Different League’s qualities of acceleration and athleticism that the bigger and bulkier Alpha Centauri could never quite get to grips with in the Albany. And now Different League is on target to become the first home-trained winner of the Prix Morny since her sire stormed away with it in 2011, Dabirsim, whose grandsire was Sunday Silence, rising from similarly humble beginnings, undefeated as a juvenile, but not training on.

Different League’s Royal Ascot timefigure (108) was good, but September’s was exceptional, second only to Expert Eye out of the whole generation. The timefigure measuring a horse’s performance purely against the clock, in the context of the card, it obviously helped that she had such a speedy sidekick in Nyaleti to charge through the checkpoints and generate such a notable number, rare for a horse to be in such an expressive environment so soon in its career, but rarer still to be electrified by it as September was.

Different League is doing everything asked, and September is doing everything ahead of schedule, already in the Group 1 zone of two-year-old rankings, but it’s a case of sticking with the plan, it seems, as September is set to swim in the manageable waters of the Group 2 Debutante rather than dive in deep in the Prix Morny, a home fixture for territory as well as trip.

It’s possible that Sunday at the Curragh will see the introduction of Group-entered Saxon Warrior, who has the Japanese suffix after his name to show where he was made. He’s out of Maybe, who, along with Peeping Fawn and Cherokee, were sent two years running by Coolmore to Japan to be covered by the royal and revered Deep Impact, the starriest of all the sons and daughters of Sunday Silence.       

The first mating of him and Peeping Fawn produced Wisconsin, who’s stuttering through the season, but their second was a match made in heaven, as it made September, and it could be an international game-changer for Coolmore as they seek a ‘Mr Right’ for all their Galileo gals. In a microcosm, that’s why September is so important, why Deep Impact is so imperative, and why Sunday Silence is still so influential.

In racing’s generational game of Who Do You Think You Are?, both Different League and September, the would-be stars of the weekend, have their ancestral ability traced back to Sunday Silence, via Dabirsim and Hat Trick for Different League, and even more directly, through Deep Impact, for September.

Hat Trick and Deep Impact raced at the same time in Japan, but only once in competition, in the 2006 Takarazuka Kinen, which Deep Impact won by four lengths, the race before he finished third past the post, at odds-on, in the Arc de Triomphe.

Something of a Holy Grail, the Arc has been an elusive prize for Japan, almost an obsession, and winning Europe’s premier race would in a way justify everything that has been put in place to make Japanese racing what it is today, dating further back than the deal to secure Sunday Silence as a star-making stallion.

Orfevre, who let it slip from his grasp in 2012, was a grandson of Sunday Silence, as is the next one tasked with trying, Satono Diamond, by – needless to say - Deep Impact, now second-favourite behind Enable in most lists for the Arc.

For a horse whose death was premature, if not so much as it might have been, achieving greatness against the odds, Sunday Silence was an equine explosion whose echoes still reverberate today around the racing world. It’s the fuel to the fires of September and Different League.