This great piece about Greg Goodman come was published originally in the Racing Post:
TWO standout lots bred by Mt Brilliant Farm in Kentucky at next week’s Keeneland September Yearling Sale demonstrate the stud’s international approach: one is a Frankel half-brother to the former Mark Johnston-trained Hartnell, a wide-margin winner of the Group 2 Chelmsford Stakes in Australia earlier in the month, and the other is a Street Cry half-brother to this season’s Belmont Stakes hero Creator out of Peruvian champion Morena.
Mt Brilliant owner Greg Goodman doesn’t pay too much attention to suffixes, though. For him, a good horse is a good horse.
Asked why he has delved into European bloodlines to purchase Debonnaire, an 11-year-old winning daughter of Anabaa, along with a number of other well-bred mares, he says: “Forever and ever, Europeans have been coming to Kentucky and buying horses, and some of our great farms here have gone to Europe and bought horses.
“Over here we breed a lot of speed whereas you breed a little more stamina, but if you look at the horses we bought in Europe, 90 per cent of them go back to American pedigrees. Debonnaire is out of a Rahy mare, for example, and another of our mares, Desert Classic [the dam of Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf winner Wrote] goes back to Special and Rough Shod.”
Goodman said it was also a temporary lack of top-end stallion talent in the US that encouraged him to breed in Europe.
“When we first started doing it we were really short of a few stallions here in America – we’ve come back substantially, but A.P. Indy had retired, Tapit was just making his way, a lot of the really top sires had gone, although Medaglia D’Oro and Street Cry were there,” he says.
“But breeding in Europe gave us more options.”
Goodman bought Creator’s dam Morena when she was in training and had proved her Peruvian form stood up in America.
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