Assistent adds to Sea The Moon's laurels with victory in Europe's final Group 1 contest of 2024

No sooner had Sea The Moon’s stud fee for 2025 been revised downwards, than the 13-year-old banged in a fifth individual Group 1 winner, with Assistent getting up late to deny British raider Tiffany in Sunday’s Grosser Preis von Bayern at Munich.

As can sometimes be the way with stallion movements or even retirements, a big winner can come along quickly to leave connections with regrets or second thoughts.

If it’s a fee we’re talking about, rather than losing the sire’s services, it is not as bad, and, indeed, Assistent’s assistance to Sea The Moon’s cause is sure to be exploited by Lanwades Stud in terms of drawing breeders’ attention to his now even more attractive-looking price of £22,500 for 2025, fully £10,000 lower than his 2024 advertised fee.

Assistent, a Henk Grewe-trained five-year-old bred by Gestut Rottgen out of the unraced but well-related Kallisto mare Anna Kalla, needed every yard of the mile and a half in the final European Group 1 contest of 2024 to beat Farhh’s daughter Tiffany by a neck and score for the seventh time at around this trip.

Previously the winner of two Group 2s, a Group 3 and a trio of Listed events, Assistent had finished runner-up in this Munich contest 12 months earlier and had also been third in the Group 1 Grosser Preis von Berlin.

His emergence comes too late for this year’s Arc, and while he strikes as the ideal type for Europe’s most valuable prize next autumn, connections indicated that a stud career now beckons.

It does so too for the year-younger Fantastic Moon, Sea The Moon's most famous offspring, who is to have one or two more starts in the Far East before taking up residency at Gestut Ebbesloh for 2025.

Muskoka, Durston and Alpine Star are the other Sea The Moon Group 1 winners, while Term Of Endearment helped keep the sire’s name in lights this year by landing the Group 2 Lillie Langtry Stakes.

Bidding on Assistent, who beat a strong field under Thore Hammer Hansen in Munich, also including Godolphin duo Ancient Wisdom (third) and Marquisat (fifth), reached €590,000 at the Arqana Arc Sale last September, when offered through Jamie Railton, but he went unsold at that price.

That was a far cry from the €58,000 Liberty Racing paid for him as a yearling at the 2020 BBAG September Sale. He was owned jointly by Liberty and Eckhard Sauren before this year, since when he has been running exclusively for Sauren, for whom this was a highly prized first Group 1 winner.

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