TWO of the three group winners at Meydan last Friday were extending their unbeaten records. Shahama is now a four-time, dual classic winner, while Manobo, a late developer, has won five times on the trot. Both appear capable of going on to greater success.

Fawzi Nass paid $425,000 for Shahama at the Ocala Breeze-Up Sale last year. Her price put her among the top 25 lots at the sale, and this daughter of Munnings (Speightstown) had a lot going for her.

Even if she never had a saddle on her back, she still possessed an enormous residual value, being a half-sister to a multiple Grade 1 winning dual champion.

Now Shahama, who added last week’s Group 3 UAE Oaks to her win in the Listed UAE 1000 Guineas, has enhanced her original sale price, and her future career plans are eagerly anticipated. She is one of half a dozen successful progeny of Private Feeling, a winning daughter of Belong To Me (Danzig).

Incredibly, given her stud record, Private Feeling was sold in 2018, carrying Shahama, to SF Bloodstock for $40,000, nine years after she was acquired for $2 million by Live Oak Stud. Yes, you read that correctly! In 2009 Private Feeling’s two-year-old son Lookin At Lucky (Smart Strike) was a triple Grade 1 winner and voted the champion juvenile colt in the USA.

Preakness win

The following year. Lookin At Lucky won the Grade 1 Preakness Stakes and the Grade 1 Haskell Stakes and at stud he has sired the Grade 1 Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Accelerate and the Grade 1 Kentucky Derby hero of 2019, Country House. Lookin At Lucky has been champion sire too in Chile.

Parallel with Lookin At Lucky’s career, his year older half-brother Kensei (Mr Greeley) won a pair of Grade 2 races, the Dwyer Stakes at Belmont and the Jim Dandy Stakes at Saratoga, but he sadly suffered a fatal accident in training.

SF Bloodstock has really reaped the benefit of owning Private Feeling, and last November at Keeneland they sold the mare’s most recent offspring, a now yearling colt by Catalina Cruiser (Union Rags) who stands for $15,000, for $200,000. Some investment and some reward.

Fee doubled

Munnings, a multiple Grade 2 winner who was placed six times at the highest level, sired a pair of Grade 1 winning juveniles in 2021, Eda and Jack Christopher. This led to his 2022 fee more than doubling to $85,000 at Ashford Stud.

The Godolphin homebred Manobo won the Group 3 Nad Al Sheba Trophy, but he did even better last year when successful at ParisLongchamp in the Group 2 Prix Chaudenay. He is one of 53 group winners and 86 blacktype winners for Gilltown Stud’s Sea The Stars (Cape Cross), the magnificent champion of his generation who won six Group 1 races in an unbeaten three-year-old season.

Manobo will hopefully go one better than his dam Tasaday (Nayef) who was also a Group 2 winner, though it was only by a nose that she failed to win a Group 1, being denied by that amount in the Prix de l’Opera. She was also placed in three other Group 1 races, the Yorkshire Oaks, Poule d’Essai des Pouliches-French 1000 Guineas, and the Prix Vermeille.

Aga Khan

This is an Aga Khan family, and the story of one that ‘got away’. At the Arqana February Sale in 2007, Gerry Mullins bought Tashelka (Mujahid) for €17,000.

At the time unraced, the three-year-old was left in training in France, and was placed on her debut for her Limerick owner, and sold before she won the second time out.

Then she was sold again, this time to go and race for Sheikh Mohammed. Tashelka went on to win a listed race at Vichy and a couple of Group 3 races, including the Prix de la Nonette at Deauville.

In addition to being the dam of Tasaday, Tashelka bred the Group 3 Desmond Stakes winner Tribal Beat (Street Cry). Tashelka’s unraced half-sister Tazkara (Sinndar) was sent to Australia and is dam of the champion older horse in South Africa, the Group 1 Sun Met winner Whisky Baron (Manhattan Rain).