Racehorse TALK

Special win

It has almost reached the stage where we just assume that every big race in Japan will be dominated by descendants of Sunday Silence. It is nowadays commonplace for each of the first three in Grade One races there to be either by a son of Sunday Silence or from one of his daughters. This year's Japan Cup, however, was nearly won by a horse who does not have Sunday Silence anywhere in his pedigree, as Tosen Jordan was beaten only neck. However, that neck was enough to ensure that the status quo continued to reign, with the race going to the champion racemare Buena Vista, who had looked so unfortunate to be demoted from first place last year. She thus follows in the footsteps of her father Special Week, a son of Sunday Silence who had won the Japan Cup in 1999,

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Sunday Silence's dominance of Japanese racing is a theme which regularly crops up in this column. America's Horse of the Year in 1989 when he was a three-year-old, Sunday Silence retired to stud in Japan in 1991. He won his first sires' championship in 1995 when his oldest offspring were aged three, and then topped the table each season until 2007. He died in 2002 at the age of 16, leaving arguably his greatest son, Deep Impact, to emerge after his death. That horse, Japan's outstandingly dominant three-year-old in 2005 and the Japan Cup winner in 2006, is now promising to be a top-class sire too. Deep Impact, though, ranks as merely one of many extremely successful Sunday Silence stallions. The few sons of Sunday Silence who have ventured to studs outside Japan have generally fared disproportionately well, while in Japan they are truly dominant. And of all his many very good sons, Special Week ranks as one of the most distinguished, formerly as a racehorse and currently as a sire.

Special Week, unlike so many high-class Japanese horses, comes from a family which has been in Japan for decades, but it has had plenty of help from international bloodlines along the way. Most immediately, his dam Campaign Girl was a daughter of Maruzensky who, although Japan's champion two-year-old of 1976, was conceived in America. Coming from the third crop of England's 1970 Triple Crown winner Nijinsky , Maruzensky naturally came from a very good family: then, even more than now, competition for places in the court of the top stallions was intense, as stallions still only used to cover books of roughly 40 mares. It is easy to understand why Maruzensky's dam Shill was deemed worthy of a place in Nijinsky's book: she was by the outstanding broodmare sire Buckpasser from the outstanding broodmare Quill, a daughter of Princequillo. Quill had been America's champion two-year-old filly of 1958. In her long breeding career, she came up with both First Feather (born in 1962 and the dam of the champion Run The Gantlet) and Last Feather (born in 1979 and a high-class filly in England, where she was placed in the Oaks in 1982) as well as several very good horses in between this pair of well-named fillies. These included the 1975 Irish St Leger winner Caucasus, a terrific racehorse who won at Grade One level in America over 12 furlongs as both a four-year-old and a five-year-old after he had moved on from Vincent O'Brien's stable to join Charlie Whittingham's barn in California.

As Caucasus, who was a year older than Maruzensky, was a son of Nijinsky, Maruzenksy (being by Nijinsky from Caucasus' Buckpasser half-sister) was clearly bred to be very good. And that is what he proved to be, most obviously by being Japan's champion two-year-old of 1976. And, unsurprisingly, he proved to be very good at stud too, regularly featuring among the leading sires in Japan with his best year (1988) seeing him finish second in the General Sires' Table. He was represented by one winner (Sakura Chiyono O, successful in 1988) of the Tokyo Yushun, which is regarded as Japan's equivalent of the Derby, while he has done even better as a broodmare sire, twice coming up with the Derby winner in this role. His first Japan Derby winner as maternal grandsire came in 1993 courtesy of Winning Ticket, a member of the first crop of the 1988 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe winner Tony Bin. Maruzensky's second Japan Derby winner as maternal grandsire was Special Week.

Special Week won the Japan Derby in 1998, being a member of Sunday Silence's fourth crop. Sunday Silence was thus clearly well established as a top stallion by the time that Special Week started racing, but even so Special Week's achievements still managed to raise his sire's profile further. Having been a top-class three-year-old in 1998 when he won the Japan Derby by five lengths, Special Week matched that level of form as a four-year-old, proving himself an outstanding galloper over middle distances and beyond. Although his three-year-old season ended with him being a beaten favourite in the Japan Cup, that defeat was still an excellent run as the two horses who finished ahead of him were El Condor Pasa (who went on to finish second to Montjeu in the following year's Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe) and Air Groove (who had won the 1996 Japan Derby and whose CV also included second place behind Pilsudski, beaten only a neck, in the 1997 Japan Cup).

As a four-year-old in 1999, Special Week, who was trained by Toshiaki Shirai and generally ridden by Yutaka Take, won three Grade One races (over 2000m, 2400m and 3200m). He completed the Spring and Autumn Tenno Sho double, beating Mejiro Bright over two miles at Kyoto in May to land the Spring Tenno Sho and beating Stay Gold and Air Jihad over 2000m in Tokyo in October to take the Autumn Tenno Sho. His final Grade One victory came four weeks later in the Japan Cup when he beat a typically strong field, headed by the Hong Kong champion Indigenous, the previous year's Derby winner High-rise and the recent Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe winner Montjeu. He narrowly failed to end his career in a blaze of glory four weeks later, failing by only a nose in arguably Japan's most prestigious race, the Arima Kinen over 2500m, going down by the minimum margin to Grass Wonder with the three-year-old T M Opera O (who went on to win five Grade One races the following year, including the Spring and Autumn Tenno Sho, the Japan Cup and the Arima Kinen) a further neck away in third.

After this outstanding racing career, it was no surprise that Special Week was recruited by the Yoshida family to stand alongside his father at the Shadai Stallion Station. His final racing figures saw him retire with ten victories to his name and earnings having broken through the billion-yen barrier.

Since retiring to Shadai in 2001, Special Week has shown himself to be one of the best of the many good Sunday Silence stallions at stud in Japan. His first top-liner was his second-crop daughter Cesario, a top-class filly who introduced her father to the wider world in 2005 by following up her victory in the Japanese Oaks by taking the Grade One American Oaks over ten furlongs at Hollywood Park in California. That same crop also saw Special Week represented by the runner-up in the Japanese Derby, his son Inti Raimi finishing second (albeit beaten five lengths) to the mighty Deep Impact. These results, though, were eclipsed once Buena Vista, a member of Special Week's sixth crop, started racing.

A daughter of the former top-class filly Biwa Heidi (who had beaten the aforementioned Air Groove when winning the Grade One Hanshin Sansai Himba Stakes at Hanshin as a two-year-old in 1995), Buena Vista has proved herself a truly special racemare. Buena Vista emulated her mother by winning that same feature race as a two-year-old in 2008, and since then she has just gone from strength to strength. As a three-year-old in 2009 she won Japan's equivalents of both the 1,000 Guineas and the Oaks before ending the year by finishing second, beaten half a length by Dream Journey, in the Arima Kinen. Last year as a four-year-old she finished runner-up in the Dubai Sheema Classic in March before enjoying another tremendous season in Japan, where she recorded Grade One victories in both the Victoria Mile and the Autumn Tenno Sho. She again ended the year by finishing second in the Arima Kinen (beaten only a nose by Victoire Pisa) after her connections had had to suffer the heartache of her demotion in the Japan Cup: she passed the post first ahead of Rose Kingdom and Victoire Pisa, but was relegated to second because of having caused slight interference on her way through.

This year Buena Vista again ran at Meydan on Dubai World Cup night in March. She looked very well placed in the world's richest race, the Dubai World Cup, being seemingly the best of the three good Japanese runners. However, she was the victim of a rare tactical blunder by former English champion jockey Ryan Moore, who elected to ride her from the rear in a falsely-run race. The result was that, while her seemingly inferior compatriots Victoire Pisa and Transcend filled the quinella after duelling for the lead throughout the final 800m, Buena Vista could only run on late to finish a never-nearer eighth. However, the frustration is now forgotten as she has won the Japan Cup - and in doing so has enabled her sire Special Week to add further depth to his own chapter of the Sunday Silence success story.