Coco Sun
Ali and Frazier. Sampras and Agassi. Redoute’s and Encosta.
Amid some of sport’s greatest rivalries, the battle between the last pair has become one of the tightest, and most engrossing, Australia’s thoroughbred landscape has enjoyed.
There’s one major difference, of course: the competition between Redoute’s Choice (Danehill), born in 1996, and Encosta De Lago (Fairy King), three years his senior, never took place on a racetrack, but has played out remarkably closely in the breeding scene.
First, the pair slugged it out for champion sire honours. Between 2006 and 2014 they took five titles between them, with Arrowfield’s Redoute’s relegating his Coolmore rival to second in 2006 and 2010, and the positions reversed in the second of Encosta’s two winning years, 2009.
But those tussles have now paled beside the toe-to-toe struggle for supremacy in their second phase rivalry, as broodmare sires.
In a couple of weeks, the two titans will have shared eight straight such premierships, filling the top two spots in the latest six. Encosta kicked things off by winning in 2016 and ’17, as his younger rival rose into the top five. They finished top two, in that order, the following year, before Redoute’s claimed his first title in 2019, by $1.3 million over Encosta.
The same quinella came in a season later, Encosta hit back in 2021 to relegate Redoute’s to second by $2.1m, before Redoute’s flipped the placings again last year.
But while Redoute’s Choice’s comfortable margin of 2022 might have forecast the fading of Encosta’s light, many have been forced to think again.
As of last night, with 11 days left of the season, Redoute’s Choice held the advantage – but only by $197,954. Considering July’s moderate prize–money, he’ll be favoured to hold onto that slender margin, and make it four titles each for the duo in eight years.
Yet by other parameters, Encosta still enjoys broodmare siring primacy.
His 19 stakes-winners for the term, headed by Alligator Blood (All Too Hard), blows away Redoute’s Choice, who sits sixth on 12, with Anamoe (Street Boss) his flag-bearer.
And on winners, Encosta also looks home, with 315 to second-placed Redoute’s Choice’s 286. The closeness of the rivalry is writ large again here: Encosta’s winners-to-runners ratio is 43.81 per cent, and Redoute’s sits at 43.86 per cent.
So, there’s little more than a cigarette paper between the two, although with age on his side Redoute’s Choice can probably be expected to finish a higher number of broodmare titles.
But in other ways, the pair have helped each other succeed at stud.
Redoute’s ranks third among Encosta’s many nicks, with mares by the former bringing the latter 20 winners from 30 runners, including two at stakes level.
On the reverse, Encosta is the number one for Redoute’s Choice, yielding 53 winners from 66 runners including no fewer than ten in black type races. That’s a phenomenal rate of 15.15 per cent of stakes-winners-to-runners, and it includes three Group 1 heroes.
It’s little surprise, then, that as one of Redoute’s Choice’s most notable progeny, The Autumn Sun, begins making impressive strides for Arrowfield, one of his first shining lights is out of a mare by Encosta De Lago.
Coco Sun, bred by Tyreel Stud’s Linda and Laurence Monds under their Wallings Bloodstock banner, became her young first-season sire’s second stakes winner in taking the Listed Oaklands Plate (1400m) at Morphettville last Saturday, making it two wins from as many starts.
A $250,000 Inglis Classic purchase for Tony McEvoy and Damon Gabbedy’s Belmont Bloodstock, and then onsold to prominent New Zealand owner and former Test cricketer Terry Jarvis, Coco Sun helped The Autumn Sun rise to seventh among Australian first–season sires, with four winners from 25 runners, and followed another of his daughters into winning a black type race, after Autumn Ballet’s Group 3 Black Opal victory.
Only Justify (Scat Daddy) and Harry Angel (Dark Angel), with just one greater stakes winner apiece, have more black type victors among first season sires than The Autumn Sun, who’s about to stand his fourth straight year at $66,000, having kicked off in 2019 at $77,000.
All in all, his first season of runners has left Arrowfield delighted, and no one at the famed stud is surprised one of his first performers is Coco Sun.
“When you look at the record of Redoute’s Choice over Encosta De Lago mares, it’s no surprise that sons of Redoute’s like Snitzel, Not A Single Doubt, and now The Autumn Sun, are leaving stakes winners from Encosta mares,” says Arrowfield pedigree analyst Peter Jenkins.
“The current strike-rate for sons of Redoute’s Choice over Encosta mares is 5.8 per cent stakes-winners-to-runners. That’s good, but you have to bear in mind it includes all the sons of Redoute’s Choice who haven’t been much good at stud too.”
The sons’ cross has yielded four Group 1 winners, with Snitzel siring three in Invader, Summer Passage and Sword Of State, and Not A Single Doubt one in Caulfield Guineas victor Mighty Boss.
“When The Autumn Sun went to stud this was a suspicion of ours,” Jenkins says, “so we tried to get a lot of Encosta De Lago mares to him.”
Coco Sun is the fifth foal out of Encosta De Lago’s 2010 mare Miss Hufflepuff, a city-winner of three races for Chris Waller bought by Tyreel and Gabbedy from the Rothwell Park draft at the Magic Millions National Broodmare Sale in 2017.
With just one foal on the ground, she cost $470,000, a hefty amount even if she was in-foal to Exceed And Excel, as the then nascent Tyreel built its broodmare band.
“We were still relatively new in the industry, and we had to build ourselves up and buy numbers,” Linda Monds says. “And Miss Hufflepuff was just a very strong and robust mare. When I look at them, you’ve got to have a pretty good imagination and picture the stock they’ll deliver, and she was a great type.”
Mind you, she has some impressive relatives. Her brother – out of Listed-winning Irish-import Miss Helga (Alzao) – was Hong Kong’s Champion Stayer of 2011-12 Liberator, a Listed winner of five races in the territory. And a second full-sibling was the Listed-placed winner Pink Siris, who has since done the family proud by throwing 2019 Group 2 Doomben Roses winner Etana and the multiple stakes-placed winner Echo Gal.
Monds also was keen on Encosta De Lago mares, and history would bear her out. Three years earlier, one of her first moves was to buy another Encosta daughter, Pinocchio, who would bear the horse responsible for the biggest payday in the illustrious Redoutes-Encosta nick – Everest winner Classique Legend, another by Not A Single Doubt.
“I do love the Encosta mares, and I’m lucky to have two very good ones,” Monds says. “They’re fairly hard to buy, and they were even back then. Plus both Pinocchio and Miss Hufflepuff are outcross mares, with no Danehill, so that’s always added value.”
Monds knew the power of Redoute’s and his sons over Encosta. At the same time, when searching for a 2019 cover for Miss Hufflepuff, she was completely won over by what met her eye at Arrowfield.
“Pedigrees and nicks and crosses have a lot of bearing on what stallions we go to,” she says, “but really what does it for me is the physical, and The Autumn Sun was just so impressive.
“He’s a big boy, strong and powerful, and a very nice physical article. Miss Hufflepuff is a very robust mare, with a strong barrel, so it’s nice to add a bit more leg, and The Autumn Sun promised that.
“Miss Hufflepuff also had a run of proven stallions, so we thought it was her time to go to a first–season sire. We knew she left good types, so an experienced mare with a new sire wasn’t a bad way to go, as opposed to a new mare with a new sire.
“And we felt the progeny would sell well, since The Autumn Sun was a champion.”
What emerged, in the filly who’s now Coco Sun, ticked all the boxes.
“She was a beautiful mover right from birth. She just floats. She could walk the house down, and so she caught a lot of people’s eyes at the sales,” Monds says.
“And she was like her mum, not just on her physical type, but with her brain. Miss Hufflepuff is just a lovely, sensible mare, and Coco Sun was like that too.”
With 105 acres on the banks of the Hawkesbury River, and no room to expand, Tyreel has built its broodmare band to 31, which Monds feels is around the optimum. It also means she’ll have to start selling mares off in the near future, which she admits will be “an emotional thing”.
“If I had a large back paddock, they wouldn’t be going anywhere,” she says, “but we’re at the stage where each year, we’ll be trading. It’s nice to think there’ll still be some value in them, because I’m not greedy in that way and will be happy for people to do well out of them. It’s the same when we sell weanlings.”
Monds also grows a little emotional discussing other sorts of relationships her business facilitates, such as the combining of Jarvis, Gabbedy and McEvoy for the first time in Coco Sun, a filly who – apart from physicals – brings a pedigree with a few tricks.
It effects that ever-reliable blending, at 4×3, of those famed Northern Dancer brothers Sadler’s Wells and Fairy King, the former through The Autumn Sun’s dam, the latter as Encosta’s sire.
And there’s a triplication, through three different mares, of the great Sir Ivor, at 6 x 6 and 5. Importantly, all three Sir Ivor strains are reinforced by having Northern Dancer across their top, and through three different sons to boot.
Redoute’s Choice’s illustrious second dam Dancing Show is by Nijinsky out of a Sir Ivor mare. Encosta is by Fairy King and has Sir Ivor as his third dam’s sire. And Miss Hufflepuff’s damsire Alzao is by Lyphard and out of a Sir Ivor mare.
“It’s one of those intricate genetic relationships that often work so well,” says Jenkins.
His daughter might have waited until deep winter to bring his keenly-awaited second stakes win, but The Autumn Sun looks set to shine brightly, and further fortify his great sire’s legacy.