Photo: Kenton Wright (Race Images)
Sometimes breeding success comes after meticulous planning. At other times, it falls in your lap.
Karaka Millions 2YO (RL,1200m) winner La Dorada (Super Seth) is the latest starlet from a Waikato Stud family that has been pure gold, one of the richest seams in the farm’s illustrious history. And to think, her heavily black typed family came to them by way of a gifted ticket in breeding’s great lottery.
It begins with Gold Rocks (Oratario), a 2006 mare who, by her sire, you may twig came from the other edge of Australasia, in Perth. And she was one of the stars of her year there, taking Western Australia’s major two-year-old event, the Karrakatta Plate (Gr 2, 1200m), her third win in her first four starts for trainer Peter Giadresco.
Gold Rocks was tried in the east with David Brideoake but didn’t fire, returned west to Simon Miller for one more win, at Belmont, and was retired in 2011.
She crossed the country again to be served by Darley’s Lonhro (Octagonal). After bearing a filly and being put in-foal to Coolmore’s So You Think (High Chaparral), she kept going east with the plan of a next covering by Waikato’s legendary Savabeel (Zabeel).
Here’s where the plotline diverged.
The owners of Gold Rocks fell on hard times. The Lonhro filly stayed put with Darley/Godolphin. Named Calaverite – for a precious metal also known as gold telluride – she won Randwick’s Gimcrack Stakes (Listed, 1000m) on debut, later adding a second Listed win and a Group 3 placing among nine starts.
Back in New Zealand, Waikato brokered a deal with the owners of Gold Rocks.
“We would pay that service fee for So You Think, the resultant foal would be theirs, and we would keep Gold Rocks,” Waikato’s Mark Chittick tells It’s In The Blood.
The filly foal was bought by Wexford Stables for $60,000 at Karaka 2015 and became Gold Rush. Trained by Lance O’Sullivan, she won the prestigious Matamata Breeders’ Stakes (Gr 2, 1200m) – her sole victory amid six starts.
For her third mating, Waikato went ahead and enacted that planned mating for Gold Rocks to Savabeel in 2013 to produce a filly they entered for Magic Millions Gold Coast in 2016. She was bought by Te Akau Racing’s David Ellis for $110,000 and returned across the Tasman. Named Gold Fever, she copied her half-sister Gold Rush by also winning the Matamata Breeders’ Stakes. It was one of her three wins from six starts, which also included a top-tier third in the ARC Diamond Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m).
Exacerbating her original owners’ rotten fate, Gold Rocks had had three foals to race. All fillies. All stakes winners.
Next up, Waikato put her to their other great stallion O’Reilly (Last Tycoon), and a fourth filly was born.
“We retained her,” Chittick says. “I really wanted to win the Matamata Breeders’ Stakes myself. We thought, ‘Gold Rocks is going to go three in a row here’.”
Alas, Chittick would not have his wish (and the Breeders’ Stakes in fact still eludes him). Put into work with Te Akau, the filly – keeping the gold theme going tangentially with a name of Gram – first injured a tendon, then went in the wind.
She ended unraced, but like a good O’Reilly mare, she’d reward Chittick in other ways: Gold Rocks’s fourth foal was put to Savabeel for her first mating, and that yielded Major Beel, ATC Derby (Gr 1, 2400m) winner for Gai Waterhouse and Adrian Bott.
Back to Gold Fever, Chittick and his father Garry bought her back off the track from Ellis. They tried a few exploratory digs without success – with Ounce (Sacred Falls), Sacred Ingot (Sacred Falls) and Miner (Tivaci) – before striking it rich again. They put Gold Fever to their new boy Super Seth (Dundeel) in his second season, the resultant filly was bought by Ellis for $190,000 at Karaka last year, and this time with a Spanish twist was named La Dorada – “the golden”.
At Ellerslie on Saturday, the filly sat half a length off the pace on the inside before coming away in the straight to win the Karaka Millions 2YO by 1.8 lengths, not only restoring Te Akau’s extraordinary record in the race after it missed its eighth straight success the previous year, but also adding another gilded chapter in the story of her granddam Gold Rocks.
She now appears set to try to bring the family its third Matamata Breeders’ Stakes, which would be quite extraordinary itself.
“It’d be maybe history-making that a mare’s left two Matamata Breeders’ Stakes winners and then one of those leaves a Breeders’ Stakes winner out of an early foal. That would be quite incredible,” says Chittick, who’ll sell La Dorada’s Tivaci (High Chaparral) half-brother at next month’s Inglis Classic sale.
“And for all of this to have happened from Gold Rocks, in the space of about 11 years is pretty amazing. We’ve done very well out of her, especially considering she’s a mare we got out of happenstance.
“And what’s more, when we acquired Gold Rocks, yes she was a Group 2 winner, but behind that the family was reasonably weak. But now it is one of our strongest families.”
And yet there’s still more, away from Waikato. Gold Rocks’s first foal, Calaverite, went on to throw Godolphin’s Caulfield Guineas (Gr 1, 1600m) winner Golden Mile (Astern), as well as the city-winning – and very golden – Telluride (Medaglia D’Oro). And second foal Gold Rush threw the Waterhouse-Bott trained Gold Bullion (Savabeel), who’s a Listed winner and Group 3 placed.
Gold Rocks is still going, though she’s encountered problems in recent seasons. Between 2018 and 2022 she had one deceased foal and two misses, before a now two-year-old Super Seth colt Chittick has put with Waterhouse-Bott, and his 2024 brother.
La Dorada is showing as a strong, on-pace sprinting filly, which is something of a family trait – among females at least. Major Beel sat on the leader’s rump and won the 2400-metre ATC Derby – something Chittick credits as perhaps a triumph of training over genetics, with some gender thrown in. Major Beel’s only win and sole placing in 13 starts since have been over 1600 metres.
“The family’s pretty typically been medium sized, strong and very fast,” Chittick says. “Major Beel is the only one on the page who’s won past a mile.
“I’d say the trainers saw they had a colt by Savabeel out of New Zealand and thought, ‘We’ve got a stayer here and that’s how we’re going to train him’. Good, tough trainers, and he’s a tough horse who got up front and won the Derby. But, I suppose, he’s by Savabeel and he’s a male, whereas the other Savabeels out of the family who won over sprints are females.”
Savabeel has long been the king of New Zealand, its champion sire for nine of the past ten seasons, eclipsing his triple champion dad Zabeel. But does Waikato now have a bona fide heir in Super Seth?
Last season’s champion first season sire in New Zealand now tops the country’s second-season table, while La Dorada’s lucrative win on Saturday pushed him up to 11th on the general sires’ ladder.
The eight-year-old son of Dundeel (High Chaparral) has sired 21 winners from 56 runners on both sides of the Tasman, including five stakes winners (8.9 per cent). He also has two Group 1 runners-up, in his best performer Linebacker and Feroce, who came second in the stallion-maker that made Waikato so keen to secure Super Seth from Australia – the Caulfield Guineas.
“When he got up and beat Alligator Blood in that Guineas, that’s what put his name in capital letters for us,” Chittick said. “We always look for a stallion that raced with a turn of foot and had speed, and certainly that day we thought, ‘Let’s try to get him’.
“It was a pretty big task to take on for New Zealand breeders, being a $AU15.5 million purchase, but so far he’s really kicking goals. He can’t be doing much more. At the end of day, he’s just leaving winners, and that’s why we got him.”
Hinting at a fine blend with New Zealand’s broodmare band, Super Seth has a distinctly Australian female side, being by a Redoute’s Choice (Danehill) mare and with names such as Rory’s Jester and Baguette near his bottom line.
He does have Kiwi breed-shaper Zabeel (Sir Tristram) prominent in his top half, as Dundeel’s damsire, but fortunately – with Savabeel rising as a broodmare sire – duplicating Zabeel through Super Seth’s offspring is showing signs of working.
La Dorada has Zabeel at 4f x 3m, and the gender-balance of putting Super Seth over Savabeel mares may be a good move. Three of his other winners are from such mares, including Patch Of Cosmo, a three-time winner in Hong Kong.
“Super Seth’s obviously got Zabeel, and we do have a lot of Zabeel blood on our farm,” Chittick says.
“The double up of Zabeel has certainly worked previously to Super Seth, and it’s working with him. We weren’t scared of doubling Zabeel with Super Seth, and the results are coming, so that’s really encouraging, because if we can cross him over Savabeel mares – fantastic.”
Chittick concedes a first-season trial-and-error lesson came from putting taller mares to the medium-sized Super Seth, with several too large offspring as a result – possibly because of the stallion’s Redoute’s Choice influence.
“That was to our surprise really, though if a mare needs a bit of leg, he’s perfect for it,” he says.
“What we’re taking from it is he’s doing his own thing. Regardless of Dundeel, he’s leaving his own type. He’s stamping his stock, we do get bays like him, and we do get chestnuts, but putting the right type of mare to him, you get a good type
“La Dorada comes from a second-crop, medium-sized mare, and we got a medium-sized filly who can run. The Super Seths look to be leader-biased runners that are tough and can maintain speed.”
Putting Super Seth over Savabeel also brings a seven-generation triplication of influential US mare Special (Forli). What’s more, it’s achieved through the well-proven combination of those great three-quarter brothers Sadler’s Wells (Northern Dancer) – a Special grandson – and her own son Nureyev (Northern Dancer).
With Nureyev also in dam Gold Fever’s bottom half, La Dorada has Special at 6f, 7m x 6m, 6m, which can never hurt.
And so putting Gold Fever to Super Seth has hatched a potential star in La Dorada, while Chittick will be hoping the two Gold Rocks colts by the same stallion will work out just as well.
All in all, it’s not been a bad return from a mare who fell into his lap.
