Dan Alford is in the food business, specifically a Melbourne factory that bakes treats like mudcakes, biscuits, jam tarts and snowballs. It can’t be a bad place to work. At the very least, it smells better than a stable. What the 68-year-old also likes to do is cook up pedigrees, and he has a particularly... Read More

When you first look up the breeders of Takeko (Saxon Warrior), who became a dual city winner at Moonee Valley last Saturday, you might think you’re barking up the wrong family tree. You’re taken to the website of James Balfe and Sarah Wills’s farm Killeenfarna, which breeds Connemara ponies. They’re horses, Jim, but not as... Read More

It was fitting indeed that King Of Roseau (Capitalist) became a stakes winner at Flemington on Saturday, for the defining feature of his pedigree – aside from a triplication of Danehill (Danzig) – is a glorious affinity with Australia’s oldest and grandest course. The gelding has a decidedly colonial pedigree – again, away from the... Read More

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... Read More

Against the tide of imported European runners and sires, supporters of Australasian-bred horses will be cheering Signature Scent (Written Tycoon), who made it two from two in impressively taking a two-year-old fillies handicap over 1100 metres at Caulfield on Saturday. Now a city winner, Signature Scent looks like fully justifying Yulong’s determined, shall we say,... Read More