34
STAR STALLIONS
RACING AHEADISSUE 178David Cormack looks at the stud career of
Urban Sea who has bred some of the best
Flat horses of the past 25 years
Urban Sea
really made
waves
S
tallions will often have over
100 representatives in every
crop with which to find that
flag-bearing star that will
ensure their name remains in
the ascendant. But mares have very
limited opportunity during their life-
times to make their mark on the
thoroughbred breed. Even a very
good broodmare has so few represen-
tatives that they are at the mercy of
the laws of statistics regarding
whether they will produce a star.
But every now and then a rare mare
emerges who produces a series of top
class offspring. That such a mare was
herself a horse that competed suc-
cessfully at the very top level is even
rarer. And when that mare’s offspring
can themselves go on to produce
large numbers of horses who can win
at the very highest echelons of the
sport then you are looking at a once-
in-a-lifetime broodmare.
Urban Sea, dam of four Group One
winners including the Derby winning
super-sires Galileo and Sea The Stars,
is one of those mares. She was not
only a once-in-a-lifetime broodmare,
her record is such that there is justifi-
cation for hailing her one of the
greatest broodmares in the history of
the sport.
She was foaled at Denali Stud in
Paris, Kentucky, bred by Marystead
Farm, the operating name for a tri-
umvirate of Frenchmen: Michel
Henochsberg, Maurice Legasse and
Marc De Chambure.
Urban Sea’s sire was Miswaki who’d
been trained in France by Francois
Boutin. His two-year-old career was
relatively successful, he’d won the Prix
de la Salamandre, finished second in
the Prix Morny and was third behind
Storm Bird when sent to Newmarket
for the Dewhurst Stakes. His pedigree
was likely to ensure any stallion duties
would be most lucratively pursued in
the United States and he was duly sent
to race there as a three-year-old.
He went on to win three allowance
races and an ungraded stakes race
before retiring to stud, standing at
Walmac International Farm where he
joined an all-star line-up which fea-
tured Nureyev and Alleged.
The dam of Urban Sea was Allegret-
ta whose background, in contrast to
Miswaki’s heavily US based ancestry,
was firmly European. Although she
possessed a GB suffix both her sire
and dam were German bred. Allegret-
ta was the first of her direct distaff line
to be born outside of Germany since
1889.
Her pedigree was laden with stami-
na. Her sire, Lombard, was a German
St Leger winner whose own sire, Agio,
was also a winner of that same race.Agio was a son of dual Arc winner
Tantieme. The first three generations
of the male side of Agio’s pedigree
were exclusively French while the cor-
responding generations on the distaff
were exclusively German. Lombard’s
second dam, Belle Sauvage, was also
the second dam of Vaguely Noble, the
1968 Arc winner. To emphasise her
staying credentials her full brother
Anno was yet another winner of the
German Leger for the family.
Allegretta raced in the UK for Sir
Michael Stoute. At two she earned a
very respectable Timeform rating of- At three her rating slipped to 97
although she started promisingly with
a second to Leap Lively in the Lingfield
Oaks trial. She struggled badly in her
next two starts, tailing off in both the
Oaks and the Park Hill Stakes at Don-
caster.
She went to the sales at the end of
the year where she was bought for just
24,000gns to go to the US. Failing to
get in foal to her first covering she was
sent back to the racetrack where,
somewhat bizarrely in light of her
racing record, she was sent sprinting, a
discipline in which she understandably
failed to make much impact. Back at
stud she proved barren again second
time around but finally conceived to
Irish Castle the following breeding
season. Possibly losing patience and