AS the classic season is well under way, the name of Sea The Stars is remembered as one of the outstanding colts of his or any generation.

He has a number of classic contenders again this year and his third crop includes Cloth Of Stars, the recent winner of the Group 2 Prix Greffulhe. This is his third group win from six career starts and he is a colt on the upgrade. Talk is that he could be an Epsom Derby contender.

Bred by Peter Anastasiou, Cloth Of Stars was sold as a yearling through Baroda and Colbinstown Studs, the sales consigning partnership of David Cox and David Myerscough. Sent to the Tattersalls Book 1 Sale in 2014, he was sold for 400,000gns to John Ferguson Bloodstock. That investment has been rewarding, with other victories coming in the Group 3 Prix des Chenes last year and the Group 3 Prix la Force on his only other start this season.

His most recent success came at the expense of Robin Of Navan, the horse that beat him in both the Group 1 Criterium de Saint-Cloud and the Group 3 Prix de Conde last year.

CLASSIC WINNER

On paper Cloth Of Stars has the pedigree of a Group 1 or classic winner. He is one of a pair of winners for his Kingmambo dam Strawberry Fledge and she was bred by and raced for the Niarchos family. She was placed on her only racecourse appearance as a juvenile and was sold as a four-year-old for 110,000gns to Grand Lodge Thoroughbreds. She is a full-sister to the Oaks winner Light Shift and a half-sister to three other stakes winners. Light Shift was also runner-up in the Irish Oaks.

Light Shift won four of her seven starts and her victories numbered the same as those compiled by her Hector Protector half-sister Shiva, the Japanese-born winner of the Group 1 Tattersalls Gold Cup and placed in both the Dubai Champion Stakes and the Coral-Eclipse Stakes. Shiva’s full-brother Limnos, also born in Japan, was a multiple Group 2 winner.

The fourth stakes-winning offspring of Lingerie, a daughter of Shirley Heights, was the Caerleon mare Burning Sunset and she is the dam of the Group 2 Prix d’Harcourt winner Smoking Sun and grandam of Main Sequence. The latter is a son of Aldebaran and this champion on the grass in the USA includes the Breeders’ Cup Turf at Santa Anita, the Turf Classic, the United Nations Stakes and the Sword Dancer Invitational Stakes among his Grade 1 wins.

There are many other stakes winners in the closer removes of the family, but it is worth mentioning that Cloth Of Stars’ third dam was the Northern Dancer filly Northern Trick, the best of her generation at three in France when she won the Prix de Diane (French Oaks) and Prix Vermeille and she was second to Sagace in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Her half-brother was the Grade 1 Jockey Club Gold Cup winner On The Sly.