SIX lengths was the impressive winning distance when Alia’s Rose ran away with the seven-furlong Prix de la Butte Blanche at Chantilly, in the colours of Jaber Abdullah and trained by Andreas Schutz. The contest was for unraced fillies, so time will tell how smart this performance was, but visually it was mouth-watering.

Bred by Haras de le Perelle, Alia’s Rose was well bought by Rabbah Bloodstock for just €90,000 as a yearling last year. She is, after all, a daughter of Ballylinch Stud’s Lope De Vega (Shamardal), and his fee the year that Alia’s Rose’s dam Quanzhou (Dubawi) was visiting him was €80,000. It is some 50% more now.

Quanzhou was good enough to be a listed winner, and one of six winners from her own stakes-placed dam Quezon Sun (Monsun).

Alia’s Rose is her sixth foal and fourth winner, and one of the others is her full-brother Hooking (Lope De Vega). Ironically he won for the fifth time in his career on the same card at Chantilly, and he has placed 14 times in 25 outings. He is no slouch, nor is he a star. Another of their siblings is twice a winner in Poland this year.

Perhaps Alia’s Rose is the one to bring some blacktype into the family, as too might her yearling half-sister by Wootton Bassett (Iffraaj). Quanzhou has certainly been given every opportunity at stud.

Dubawi visit

Why would Quezon Sun have been sent to Dubawi in the first place? Well, she had already bred a Group 1 winner, he being Mille Et Mille (Muhtathir). He was a popular stayer in France and won 11 races up to and including the age of 10 when he was successful at listed level. Mille Et Mille won the Prix du Cadran at the age of five, and he was runner-up too in the same event.

This is a solid, if unspectacular, German female line, with one of the standouts being Alia’s Rose’s third dam Quezon City (Law Society), Her three wins included a classic trial, she was runner-up in the Group 1 Deutschland Preis and the Group 2 Deutsches-German Derby.