Duchess Zou
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when Arrowfield Stud great Snitzel (Redoute’s Choice) wasn’t all that valued as a broodmare sire. The past is another country and all that.
But faith in his “rival” stallion as a maternal grandfather in those days from Widden Stud’s Antony Thompson is now paying off handsomely through exciting filly Duchess Zou (Zoustar).
Trained – and wholly raced on lease – by Ciaron Maher, the impressive darkly coloured three-year-old made it three victories from five starts in becoming a city winner at Flemington last Saturday, beating the boys in a 1400-metre three-year-old handicap by 1.25 lengths.
She added an extra kick to Widden flagbearer Zoustar’s (Northern Meteor) romp to his first champion sires’ title, as one of his five Australian winners over the weekend – alongside others from his shuttling days at Saratoga, Ripon and Redcar and a stakes placing at Del Mar.
Duchess Zou, bred by Widden and associates Bill Betar and Telemon Stud’s Dan Fletcher, adds further proof to some favourite tricks involving Zoustar.
She has Redoute’s Choice (Danehill) as her damsire’s sire, which means she has that stallion repeated at 3f x 3m, since he’s Zoustar’s damsire.
Thompson has seen enough of Zoustar to know duplicating Redoute’s, even closer in, is no red flag. Haut Brion Her (Zoustar), winner of two Group 2 sprints has him at 3f x 2f, after all.
“Zoustar has been successful with that duplication of Redoute’s Choice,” Thompson told It’s In The Blood, adding his stallion had also been successful with mares by another son of Redoute’s Choice in Not A Single Doubt.
Zoustar over Not A Single Doubt has hatched 12 winners from 17 runners, including the cross’s sole stakes winner, Group 1 hero and new Rosemont Stud stallion Schwarz, a five-time stakes victor.
But Snitzel mares run far better, with five stakes winners among 22 runners (22 per cent) amongst 18 victors overall – Zoustar’s best stakes winners to runners percentage for more than 11 runners. The chief among that group is Zoustar’s highest earner of his champion season, and new Yulong sire, Growing Empire.
This supports the assertion Thompson had around the time he bought Duchess Zou’s dam, Miss Wonderland (Snitzel).
Bred by Edinburgh Park’s Ian Smith, from a family he’d cultivated including her American dam Alice’s Smart (Smart Strike), Miss Wonderland was a $200,000 yearling in 2015 who impressed plentifully with three wins in a 13-start career despite squeezing in four trainers in that time.
The first was Maher, who debuted her as a June two-year-old with a win on the Pakenham synthetic, saw her earn her dash of black type when third in a Flemington Group 3 at her next start, then celebrated one of her two city wins, at the same course.
She went to the Magic Millions National Broodmare Sale in 2018, where she was knocked down to Thompson for $250,000. The 28 Snitzel mares there averaged just $149,600, putting him only tenth on the list for sires with ten or more mares sold.
At the same sale this year, Snitzel ranked fifth by the same measure, with 12 mares averaging $208,000. That’s commensurate with the late stallion’s surge up the broodmare sires’ table. He’s currently in third place – behind only two all time greats in Fastnet Rock (Danehill) and his own sire Redoute’s Choice – up from a finish of ninth last season.
“At the time I bought her, there was a bit of a stigma about Snitzel mares, but I always liked them and I bought quite a few of them,” Thompson says.
“He’s been a fantastic sire, and you’d always have faith in him to be a good broodmare sire, but at earlier stages of his career there was a bit of doubt about Snitzel mares.
“Although he started out with a bit of a bang with a Slipper winner early on, there was a bit of a time where you could buy Snitzel mares relatively cheaply.”
There’s that quirkiest of stats about Snitzel. He’s a three-time Golden Slipper (Gr 1, 1200m)-winning sire, but four years before his first – and four years before Thompson bought Miss Wonderland – he’d been a Slipper-winning broodmare sire, via Mossfun (Mossman).
As a broodmare sire now, Snitzel has 34 stakes winners from 907 runners at 3.74 per cent, and 68 stakes horses at 7.5 per cent.
Aside from his faith in Snitzel, Thompson felt Miss Wonderland was “a nice mare with a nice pedigree, and a lovely family” who physically matched well with Zoustar.
Her second dam was Darling Alice (Northern Flagship), a Listed winner in the US who threw the dams of two Australian stars, also bred by Smith, by that Danehill sire Fastnet Rock: $2.5 million earner Eleven Eleven (Fastnet Rock) and Glenfiddich (Fastnet Rock), a Group 2 winner who was Group 1 placed, and now stands at Aquis Farm.
Darling Alice also left Quiet Alice (Quiet American), dam of four stakes winners in Venezuela. Smith went to quite some trouble to import the best of them, Piacenza (League Of Nations), in 2019, as Venezuela melted down in a political crisis.
Further back, there’s real quality in Duchess Zou’s fifth dam Avowal (L’Enjoleur), an eight-time stakes winner in Canada who threw three more black type victors.
Miss Wonderland made a very solid start as a broodmare for Thompson, Betar and Fletcher. First foal Daytona (Sebring) – a $500,000 Gold Coast yearling – became a city winner in Sydney and Brisbane, while second foal Hell (Hellbent) has scored three times in the Queensland capital so far.
Duchess Zou is the third, has outstripped both brothers already with her stakes placing, and promises more and better black type to come.
Retained by her breeders and ultimately fully leased by Maher after an original lease deal fell through, Duchess Zou boasts a robust deeper pedigree.
She has the mighty influential Mr Prospector (Raise A Native) at 6f, 5m x 4m.
He comes into Zoustar’s sire Northern Meteor (Encosta De Lago) twice through Rolls – Encosta De Lago’s granddam – and via Northern Meteor’s damsire Fappiano.
And Mr Prospector comes in powerfully at the bottom as the grandsire of Alice’s Smart.
Duchess Zou also has Northern Dancer (Nearctic) five times in her first six generations through four different offspring. He’s the fourth sire of Zoustar and Snitzel, and of Zoustar’s dam, and also comes in strong at the bottom as Darling Alice’s grandsire. Northern Dancer appears ten times all up through the first nine columns.
Northern Dancer’s blue hen mother Natalma (Native Dancer) comes in seven times in the first seven generations, and 12 times in the first nine.
And another blue hen is duplicated at 7f x 7m in Canadian phenomenon Fanfreluche (Northern Dancer). She’s Encosta De Lago’s fourth dam, and is the mother of L’Enjoleur (Buckpasser), sire of Duchess Zou’s fifth dam Avowal.