Sires of Two-Year-Olds
I’ve been poking around into some stats relating to sires in our wonderful Two-Year-Old Maiden Special Weight races and have a few findings that I’d like to share. First, the dataset that I was working with contained all of the 2YO MSW races in North America with a purse of $30K or greater over the past five years (from 2020 through 2024).
In total, there were 6136 such races and a grand total of 51,708 runners; hence an average field of 8.43 horses per race. This tells us that the average strike rate for a sire would be 11.87% - let’s round off to 12%. This gives us a baseline to determine if a specific stallion produced a higher or lower than expected average number of winners on a percentage basis.
I started by looking at Into Mischief and as expected, he checked in with a win rate of 17.2% (127 of his babies scored in 737 attempts). This certainly places him in the ‘Over Average’ bucket, but somewhat surprisingly in the ‘second tier’.
So, if arguably the best sire standing in North America ‘only’ throws 17.2% winners in our study, which studs are more ‘studly’? Below are a few that I found…
Twirling Candy comes in a point ahead of the great Into Mischief with a strike rate of 18.2%. At 18.4% (79 for 430) is the Darley stallion, Nyquist. And no surprise to find the sire who stands for $250K - Gun Runner - way up the list at 19.2% winners (71 winners from 369 starters. One that you may not have guessed that comes in at 19.8% is Girvin. However, he’s only sent out 156 runners, but a healthy 28 have found the winners circle. Moving up the list is Taylor Made’s Not This Time. He checks in at 19.9% (75 for 376) and demands $175K per mating.
Two First-Crop Stallions from 2024 put up big numbers, too. Volatile had 20 winners at this level last year from 103 starters giving him a win rate of 19.4%. The champ, however, in this category comes a no surprise to anyone. Vekoma sired an amazing 28 winners within these parameters from a total of 123 starters, earning a strike rate of 22.8%.
Please consider subscribing as I’ll be pushing out more data on these terrific babies.