The Rise of Danzig/Danehill

With Group One racing for this season in Australia now at an end we decided to take a more in depth look at the sirelines that now dominate as compared to the past going back to the 1993/1994 season which marked the arrival of Danehill (USA) and his first Group One winner, the Golden Slipper winner Danzero.

In that pivotal season, the Group One landscape was dominated by two major sirelines, Northern Dancer and Turn-To (for the purposes of this research we have combined two major branches of Turn-To dynasty in Sir Gaylord and Hail to Reason including it’s derivative branches of Roberto and Halo), accounting for 24% each of the total number of Group One winners, with former dominant force Star Kingdom (IRE) back to 16%.

We then jumped forward in time to the 2001/2002 season and the pendulum has clearly swayed in favour of the Northern Dancers with 32% of the total and Turn-To sliding to 17%, with Star Kingdom (IRE) declining further to 13%.

Our last sample year is the current season and here we see the Northern Dancer clan has obliterated everything in it’s path to gain 64% of the total, with the remainder made up of a range of splinter groups, Mr Prospector and Turn-To the largest of these with 8% each and Star Kingdom (IRE) relegated to near extinction with 2%.

The Northern Dancer dynasty is at a point where you can now break it down into branches of it’s own and from that we see Danzig as the clear leader of the group, no surprises there and his son Danehill the dominant force as a prolific sire of sires.

In our first sample year of 1993/1994, the Danzig line had just the one Group One winner in Danzero and in 2007/2008 it was responsible for 15 (including probably the last direct Danehill winner in Shinzig), a dramatic rise and due in part largely because of Danehill.

The big question now is which, (if any) of his sons will take the line forward in terms of siring sires and if not one of them, which other branch of Northern Dancer will emerge as dominant in the next ten years.

While the search goes on for a totally different sireline to take us forward into the future, for the time being it would seem that breeding back to different branches of Northern Dancer is proving effective and is what most commercial breeders seem to fall back on.

Whether that will prove detrimental long term remains to be seen.

Footnote: This will be an ongoing permanent feature of Breednet that will be added to each year.