Lot 140 Christchurch – Getting Closer, a filly from a McArdle mare bred to Courage Under Fire (Withdrawn)
Although withdrawn from the sales, this lot is worth discussing as it is only the second foal from a McArdle dam to show up in a yearling sales catalogue. (last year’s Lot 30 at Karaka was the first, and I’ll mention a bit about that at the end of the blog.)
In this instance, the McArdle dam is Roanne who was bred by Jack Smolenski from Laurent Perrier, and therefore a half sister to the top mare Lancome. Tony Barron bought Roanne at the 2007 yearling sales for $41,000 mainly as a potential broodmare investment. She’s part of Jack Smolenski’s Regal Guest family that regularly produces top performers from its branches, often the fillies showing up at group level.
At the time, the pedigree page shows Roanne’s half brothers The Phantom Guest and In Monaco as good performers but half sister Lancome was yet to start her wonderful career. Since then Laurent Perrier produced the talented Smo, also by Courage Under Fire. So in hindsight the purchase of a smallish McArdle filly in 2007 has turned out to be a very canny move.
Roanne was tried as a racehorse and showed some speed (taking a 1.59.2 winning mark, and 1.57.9 best placed time), but once the win was achieved Roanne was always going to be heading to a breeding career.
Tony Barron describes the choice of Courage Under Fire as Roanne’s first mating as “100% because of Lancome” – who is, of course, a Courage Under Fire mare. “At first I wondered about putting a smaller mare (Roanne) to a smaller sire (Courage Under Fire), but the result is a nice sized filly,” he says. “We bred the mare back to Courage Under Fire the next season and I was clear with PGG Wrightson that if the resulting foal was a colt, we would withdraw the filly from the sale.”
And that’s what has happened, and what Tony Barron describes as a very nice full brother (by Courage Under Fire from Roanne) born this season will be heading for the yearling sales next year.
McArdle has been a bit of a puzzle as a sire so far, and it seems a lot of his fillies need time (and that’s been the same with his colts too, in spite of a couple of precocious ones like Tintin In America).
His own sire, Falcon Seelster, produced a handful of truly outstanding fillies in New Zealand – Coburg, Hot Shoe Shuffle, De Lovely spring to mind – but Falcon Seelster’s longer term reputation will be more for his colts, his overall quality and quantity of competitive foals and increasingly as a damsire. (Already his damsire stats are equal to In The Pocket in terms of foals to winners). So it is quite possible McArdle will go the same way.
Having said that, there are some nice McArdle fillies like Elusive Chick showing up now, and that’s what McArdle really needs at this point in his siring career – a few more winners that go on to perform at the group level and excite us rather than just good overall percentages.
There were only 7 McArdle fillies for sale in the 2007 yearling catalogue, 6 of them at Christchurch. Interestingly that $41,000 price that Tony Barron paid for Roanne that year was equalled by Lot 129 Zenardle (McArdle-Zenara), who was also from a longstanding good family founded on Zenover (grandam of Elsu and 4th dam of Tintin In America, so that filly had a strong Falcon Seelster/McArdle connection in terms of successful sires).
Zenardle had only one race start before embarking on her broodmare career, and she can claim the very first damsire credit for McArdle at the yearling sales. That was last year (2011) when a Bettor’s Delight filly from Zenardle was bought for $10,000 by Steve Clements of Brisbane Pastoral Company Ltd and is now an unraced 2yo in Australia.
So in both cases, these two McArdle mares (Roanne and Zenardle) were originally sold at the same yearling sales in 2007 and for the same good price. They both come from strong old families that can produce top performers. They have both been put to quality proven sires, and both are smaller sires with reputations for speed and more chance of producing early types.
It will be interesting to follow them and their offspring in the years to come.
b4breeding 
Hi there, love the blog especially as there aren’t that many standardbred breeding blogs around.
I recently purchased a race mare from the same family (her Grand Dam is a half sister to Regal Guest) and was also considering sending her too Courage Under Fire this year. The dam of my mare is by Falcon Seelster so fingers crossed i can expect good things.
It shows reverse crosses to Adios Butler and Light Brigade and with the addition of Falcon Seelster it adds another Adios Butler on the dam side. Not sure if thats the reason for the success of Courage Under Fire with this family but fingers crossed it helps.
Thanks Pete, sorry it’s taken me a little while to respond but I’ve been fighting a virus and researching Nedda-land! (see latest blogs)
I confess Adios Butler is a horse I know very little about, but now I see him popping up in quite a few pedigree lines as you mention. I looked up my John Bradley Modern Pacing Sire Lines and saw he was a fantastic racehorse, taking out the Triple Crown, Little Brown Jug etc. He refers to him as a “raw speed” horse but notes “Adios Butler left nothing for the future on the male or female side..” Well, maybe Kiwis would argue with that, since he’s the damsire of Smooth Fella amongst other things. I’ll do some more reading – it’s great to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of these names in our bloodlines.
[…] (from the Sokys Atom mare Zenara) and as the name suggests, her sire is McArdle. I blogged about Zenardle when she was one of the first McArdle mares to have progeny at the yearling sales in 2012, and she’s gone on to do a good job – that first foal of hers at the yearling […]