'Kentucky Oaks or Derby win from his first crop would be absolutely incredible'

Pausing for a moment to consider his choice of words, David Fiske quickly shifts into verbal high gear.

“It’s awesome. It’s amazing. It’s never been seen before,” he says when describing the stratospheric early sire success of 2017 American Horse of the Year Gun Runner. “I just run out of adjectives after a while. I’m just in awe of him.”

Fiske has leapt into this conversation with an emphatic statement of “one of my favourite topics!” at the mention of Gun Runner, the now nine-year-old son of Candy Ride who stands at Three Chimneys Farm in the Lexington area of Kentucky.

Gun Runner shattered the North American record for first-crop earnings in 2021, getting two Grade 1 winners including champion filly Echo Zulu and six black-type winners among his runners, who banked a total of $4,278,641, eclipsing the previous mark of $3.7 million set by Uncle Mo.

With Echo Zulu set to compete in the Kentucky Oaks on Friday and 2022 Grade 1 winners Taiba and Cyberknife in the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, Gun Runner is loaded to rocket further upward. Another Gun Runner colt, Grade 3 winner Early Voting, also qualified for America’s most famous race, giving him a trio of top colts and the undefeated leading filly from his first crop of 127 total registered foals.

With two shares in him having sold recently, Gun Runner’s value already exceeds $50 million, and could reach significantly above that level, according to those who have knowledge of the private transactions that have been kept hush-hush.

Fiske knows this rarefied air as well or better than anyone. As the long-time racing and farm manager for Winchell Thoroughbreds, which until the shares were sold had co-owned Gun Runner solely with Three Chimneys, he has played a pivotal role in the stallion’s development.

He also helped establish another American sire icon, Tapit, who was raced by Ron and Joan Winchell’s Winchell Thoroughbreds after Fiske signed a $625,000 ticket for the horse at the 2002 Keeneland September yearling sale.

Both Tapit and Gun Runner achieved the unusual distinction of leading both North America’s freshman sire list and leading sire of two-year-olds list with their first crops, with Tapit reigning in 2008 prior to his record-setting trio of years as America’s top general sire from 2014-2016.

There was no stopping Tapit after his initial crop raced to headlines, and it appears there will be no stopping Gun Runner, who began his stud career at a fee of $70,000 and who is commanding $125,000 this season.

Gun Runner's son Taiba pictured on Monday limbering up for the Kentucky Derby

Yet Fiske quickly defers credit to the horses themselves, demurring when asked what has been the secret in guiding the destiny of the stallions, neither of which was the most ballyhooed of their generation when they began stud duty.

Juddmonte’s 2016 horse of the year Arrogate, who had set a North American career earnings record of $17.4m, commanded a stud fee $5,000 higher than Gun Runner’s when both began serving mares in 2018. Tapit, now 21, launched his stud career off a $15,000 fee and soared to $300,000 before receding to his current $185,000.

“The horses have to do it on their own,” Fiske says of their subsequent sire records. “Given the number of horses put into stallion service every year, everybody has the same hopes, everybody tries to do the same thing - get the best mares and pedigree crosses and conformation and everything else.

"Some horses are just more successful than others, and some of them, Tapit and Gun Runner, are just wildly successful.

“I think they are just elite individuals that come along from time to time, it seems to me about every 20 years. The spacing between Northern Dancer and Mr. Prospector and Storm Cat, I don’t know exactly. But it just seems like as soon as one elite stallion starts to get older and kind of fade, there is another one of that calibre that shows up.

"We’ve been incredibly lucky and fortunate to be associated with two of them."

Both Fiske and Tom Hamm, Three Chimneys' director of stallion seasons, say that Gun Runner, who has 118 two-year-olds of 2022 and 110 yearlings, is now in an ideal position going forward.

The stallion will cover his largest book yet - 200 or more mares - this season, with Winchell and Three Chimneys able to slot in dates for particularly distinguished mares to visit him as the season has progressed, including Jane Lyon’s homebred Grade 1 winner Chasing Yesterday, half-sister to Triple Crown winner American Pharoah.

Gun Runner, pictured at Three Chimneys Farm on Monday

Hamm says: “We’ve got just an outstanding book of mares to him, including [Spendthrift Farm’s champion] Beholder and a lot of Grade 1 winners and Grade 1 producers. Without a doubt, it’s his best book of mares to date. With what he’s already done, it makes for an exciting future, for sure.

“There was a substantial number of mares we couldn’t take because the requests were so high. We spent a lot of time sifting through pedigrees and checking nickings, checking the mares’ race records and what they had produced.

"We tried to pick the ones we thought not only were the best mares but the ones that matched up best for Gun Runner.”

The mares include some from Japan’s most successful studs, the Northern and Shadai Farms of Katsumi and Teruya Yoshida. Before this year’s flood of interest, a significant number of the mares bred initially to Gun Runner - and which were crucial conduits for his resulting sire brilliance - came from Winchell and Three Chimneys, with the latter breeding Early Voting.

Winchell Thoroughbreds bred 17 mares to Gun Runner in his first season, slightly more than half of the mares in the farm’s overall band and far more than it had sent to any other of the unproven stallions it had previously retired, including Tapit.

“We’ve never supported one the way we did with Gun Runner - we’ve always been pretty cautious not to go too far out on a limb with new stallions, but I think we came to the decision that if you were ever going to go all-in on a stallion, he would be the one,” says Fiske, citing Gun Runner’s ability to carry his considerable speed up to a mile and a quarter and his prodigious record of six Grade 1 wins as the rationale.

David Fiske: 'We’ve been incredibly lucky and fortunate to be associated with Tapit and Gun Runner'Credit: Anne M Eberhardt

That commitment paid off handsomely with many of Gun Runner’s first stakes winners, such as Grade 1-winning colt Gunite and Grade 2-winning filly Wicked Halo, in addition to three-time Grade 1 winner Echo Zulu, both bred and raced by Winchell, as was multiple stakes winner Optionality.

With the two-year-olds running so well last year, Winchell was also able to sell yearlings for substantial rewards, including Gun Runner’s top-priced yearling of 2021, a $975,000 colt out of the Tapit mare Time To Tap, a full-sister to champion Untappable. That colt was purchased at Keeneland by Repole Stable and St Elias.

As Winchell was able to provide a wealth of Tapit mares, having retained a sizable interest in Tapit for his stud career at Gainesway Farm, that stallion has provided a go-to nick through mares bred to Gun Runner. Tapit is the broodmare sire of Wicked Halo and stakes winner Red Run.

The line of Tapit’s grandsire, A.P. Indy, works well in general when crossed with Gun Runner, with Taiba an example of the successful progeny.

Major success with Gun Runner’s offspring has also resulted from dams carrying another line of Storm Cat, the grandsire of Gun Runner’s dam, Grade 2 winner Quiet Giant, a daughter of Giant’s Causeway and half-sister to 2005 horse of the year Saint Liam. Echo Zulu is 4x4 to Storm Cat, Gunite is 3x3 to Giant’s Causeway, and Grade 2 winner Poppacap is 4x5 to Storm Cat.

Physically, Gun Runner fits many mares. Standing 16.1 hands, he is a lithe individual with a silken smooth way of going.

“He’s a very athletic, well-balanced horse, and he’s a great mover,” says Hamm. “Everything that you would think would make a great racehorse - that’s what he is.”

Gun Runner and Florent Geroux win the Breeders' Cup ClassicCredit: Edward Whitaker

Fiske pointed out that Gun Runner was remarkably sound, with trainer Steve Asmussen and team revealing that they did not even feel the need to ice or poultice the horse’s legs while he was in training.

After winning two of his three starts as a juvenile, Gun Runner got better with each successive season and capped his career with five consecutive Grade 1 triumphs, including the Breeders’ Cup Classic at four and the Pegasus World Cup on his final start at five.

Judging by his first offspring, Gun Runner generously passes along his physical characteristics, as well as his professional demeanour. Both Hamm and Fiske noted how the foals in his first crop made an immediate impression as good-moving athletes, encouraging owners to breed more mares to him in the following years.

At this point, Gun Runner’s future could not appear any brighter. In addition to setting the pace for his generation, he currently leads all American sires of three-year-olds on dirt - including the likes of Into Mischief, Curlin, Uncle Mo, Tapit and Quality Road - in every key category, with five black-type winners and 13 black-type performers, four Graded winners and two Grade 1 winners this season.

Gun Runner also has what Fiske called the “rather gaudy” statistic of 14 per cent black-type winners from career starters through late April.

And even though Gun Runner has the fewest starters, 60, of any horse among the top half of the 2022 leading general sire list, he ranked number 13 by progeny earnings as of May 1.

It’s almost mind-boggling to think of the impact if one of the offspring from his first crop wins the Kentucky Oaks or Derby - although, ironically, the highly-regarded Epicenter, owned by Winchell and sired by another rising star, Not This Time, could upend the Derby hopes.

An Oaks or Derby winner in a stallion’s initial crop is like rocket fuel, and Hamm said the impact of a Gun Runner-sired Classic winner would be “huge".

“That would solidify what we already know: Gun Runner is a great stallion," he declares. "To get that in his first crop would be absolutely incredible and it would be a testament to what a good stallion he already is - and will be for years to come."

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