BACK at the end of March I mentioned in my editorial that the turf season was starting in Ireland and Britain. The French were a little ahead of us, and had staged the first juvenile race of the year in Europe that week.

That was the Prix du Premier Pas at Lyon Parilly and it was won by Con and Theresa Marnane’s Bottle Of Bubbles, a daughter of Cotai Glory (Exceed And Excel). Bred by Donal Boylan, the filly sold from Rockton Stud for £18,000 (€20,160) at the Tattersalls Ireland September Yearling Sale which was held in Newmarket.

The price was helped enormously by the successful start made at stud by Tally-Ho Stud’s Cotai Glory, and his first crop of runners were headed by the Group 2 Prix Robert Papin winner Atomic Force, while a couple of his sons had been runners-up at Royal Ascot in the Group 2 Coventry Stakes and Listed Windsor Castle Stakes.

A leap of faith was needed from Con Marnane to buy the filly. Were you to take the fourth dam off the pedigree page, you would have been taking away more than half of the pedigree! That fourth dam, three-time winner Penny Pincher (Constable), bred the smart sprinter Clantime (Music Boy), winner of nine races and group-placed, and her descendants include Group 1 winners Airwave (Air Express), Jwala (Oasis Dream), Dream Of Dreams (Dream Ahead), Churchill (Galileo) and Clemmie (Galileo).

Closely related

That said, the filly on sale that day is connected to these winners by a thread, and I may be more closely related to Con that she is to those winners!

Bottle Of Bubbles is in the news as she travelled from France to Italy and won the six-furlong Group 3 Premio Primi Passi in Milan, having run second in a listed race in Rome previously. These efforts mean she became the first stakes-earner of any kind in three generations of her family.

The third foal of her dam, the dual juvenile winner Somedaysrdiamonds (Equiano), Bottle Of Bubbles is the first to win or be placed.

Somedaysrdiamonds is one of seven winners out of two-year-old winner Good Health (Magic Ring), and that number could yet grow. Good Health was, by contrast, the only one of the seven foals out of Fiddling (Music Boy) to win. A feature of the family is speed and precocity, features no doubt identified by Con Marnane, and now his gamble last year has paid off with a group winner.