“HE was a great character and will be much missed. He leaves some really good yearlings and foals; one can only hope there’s another Animal Kingdom amongst them.”

With those words last week Kirsten Rausing described Leroidesanimaux who died at the age of 16 at Lanwades Stud. Sire of the Kentucky Derby and Dubai World Cup winner Animal Kingdom, the stallion had been side-lined in recent times, but his untimely death robs European breeders of an ideal outcross for many mares currently at stud.

Foaled in Brazil and a son of the French 2000 Guineas runner-up Candy Stripes, Leroi (as he was affectionately known at Lanwades) shared his sire with another winner of the world’s richest race, the Argentine-bred Invasor. Starting his racing career in his country of birth, Leroidesanimaux was runner-up in a Group 1 race from just three juvenile starts, and then he was sent to the USA.

There and in Canada he won eight of his 10 starts, three of them at Grade 1 level, and he was runner-up to Artie Schiller in the Breeders’ Cup Mile. He earned more than $1.65 million and won an Eclipse Award as the champion turf horse in 2005.

One of seven winning offspring of the Ahonoora mare Dissemble, his dam is a half-sister to two other mares who produced Group 1 winners, the best of these being the ‘Blue Hen’ Hasili. This daughter of Kahyasi is the dam of five Group or Grade 1 winners, grandam of another and also the dam of the influential stallion Dansili.

Hasili’s quintet of top-notch winners are Banks Hill, Cacique, Intercontinental, Champs Elysees and Heat Haze. Banks Hill and Intercontinental both are Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf winners, with the first named also winning the Coronation Stakes and the Prix Jacques Le Marois. A feature of all five Grade 1 winners out of Hasili is that they are by sons of Danzig, four being by Danehill and one by Green Desert.

In the USA Leroidesanimaux was trained by the great Bobby Frankel. Meeting defeat on his American bow, he ran up a sequence of eight straight victories, and then ended his career at the Breeders’ Cup in Belmont. Animal Kingdom is his best runner to date, and he stands for $35,000 at Darley in America. One runner by him that will be familiar to racegoers here is Glor Na Mara, the Jim Bolger trained colt who chased home none other than Frankel and Roderic O’Connor in the Group 1 Dewhurst Stakes.