BREEDERS’ Cup glory is not new to Knicks Go, and this week the stud fee for the recent winner of the Grade 1 Classic at Del Mar was announced. He will stand his first season at Taylor Made in Kentucky for $30,000. The 10-time winner was not far off being a triple Breeders’ Cup winner. At two he was runner-up in the Juvenile.

This year Knicks Go also won the Grade 1 Pegasus World Cup Invitational Stakes and the Grade 1 Whitney Stakes, and he has been successful 10 times and earned almost $8.7 million. The five-year-old son of Paynter (Awesome Again) last year won the Grade 1 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile at Keeneland in record time.

Knicks Go is the only Grade 1 winner, from five crops of racing age, by his WinStar sire who is now responsible for 18 stakes winners. Paynter’s sole stakes win came in the Grade 1 Haskell Stakes at three, the same season that he was runner-up to Union Rags in the Grade 1 Belmont Stakes.

O’Callaghan

Knicks Go was purchased as a foal for $40,000 from his Marylandbreeder Angie Moore and sold as a yearling by Peter O’Callaghan’s Woods Edge Farm for $87,000.

This is a pedigree that can trace its Maryland roots back at least five generations. Knicks Go’s dam Kosmo’s Buddy won the Maryland Million Turf Sprint at Laurel, one of five career victories, and she is a daughter of Outflanker (Danzig). Knicks Go is by some way the best of her four winners.

Kosmo’s Buddy’s yearling filly is by Justify (Scat Daddy) and she failed to appear in the Keeneland sale ring in September, while this spring she foaled a filly by Ghostzapper and he, like Paynter, is a son of Awesome Again (Deputy Minister). The mare was covered this year by Uncle Mo (Indian Charlie).

You need to go back to the fourth generation to find the only other Grade 1 winners on the page, the Matriarch Stakes heroine Countus In (Dancing Count). She made her mark at stud, producing a couple of stakes winners and being grandam of Ransom The Moon (Malibu Moon) who was twice successful in the Grade 1 Bing Crosby Stakes at Del Mar.