Barrel racing and flat racing are seeing more crossover in the sale ring and breeding shed.
By Denis Blake, Courtesy of America’s Horse Daily
It’s easy to say that barrel racing and flat racing are similar in that the fastest horse wins, but on the other hand, the two industries can sometimes seem worlds apart. In recent years, however, those two distinct worlds have come closer as barrel racers seek to add more speed to their bloodlines, and racehorse breeders and stallion owners seek new revenue streams. While hard numbers are difficult to come by, the fact that a barrel horse sold for $50,000 at this year’s Heritage Place Winter Mixed Sale – one of racing’s biggest auctions – is a good indication that the level of crossover between the two industries is on the rise. “I’ve seen an increasing number of barrel trainers at the January Heritage Sale that are buying straight racehorse prospects to make barrel horses out of them,” says performance horse breeder Jud Little, who stands seven stallions at his Jud Little Ranch near Ardmore, Oklahoma. “They are making a very significant impact on the racehorse sale industry.”
Not only are barrel racers making an impact on the sale industry, they are also having an impact on the breeding industry. Jud, who has been operating his ranch for more than 35 years, has long been an advocate of bringing racehorse blood into barrel racing. And he’s not alone.
“The competition in barrel racing is so fierce now,” says Mary Ellen Hickman, president of Future Fortunes Inc., a stallion incentive program for barrel horses. “Maybe the dam is more of a working-bred horse, but they go to a racehorse sire to get some more speed in there.” After all, speed is the name of the game whether you are running down the track or around the barrels. “I’m all about that speed; it makes up for so many other things,” Jud says.
Racehorse Stallions for Barrel Racing
Racehorse breeders might not recognize many names in the pedigrees of Jud’s stallions, until they get to No Mas Corona. The 6-year-old stallion is by First Down Dash’s son Fishers Dash and is out of the winning Sizzle Te broodmare of the year Sizzling Lil, who has produced racing champions Corona Chick and Corona Kool. According to Jud, No Mas Corona flashed brilliant speed in morning workouts until an injury stopped his racing career before it even started. “We are primarily marketing him to barrel horse people, and they have really accepted him wonderfully. His first crop is now 2-year-olds, and we really like them.” But unlike with a racehorse stallion, where you can at least get an idea of his chances for success at the end of his first crop’s 2-year-old season, it takes longer in the barrel racing world where the majority of horses don’t compete until age 4 or 5 and sometimes don’t achieve success until they approach double-digit age. “It takes five years (to prove a barrel stallion), and it’s a painstakingly exhausting kind of thing to wait that long, but it’s just the nature of the beast,” Jud says.
Jud has noticed that other barrel horse breeders are also adding race-bred stallions to their rosters. Many others are breeding to established race-bred stallions, and broodmares with racehorse blood have long been successful in barrel racing. “(All American Futurity winner) Bugs Alive In 75 has been a leading maternal grandsire of barrel horses for years,” he says. “It’s a matter of picking and choosing the right bloodlines. I’ve identified six or seven lines of horses, both Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse, that might not suit on the first or second line of pedigree but I might like to see them on the third line. I constantly tinker with it.”
Dual-Purpose Stallions
The barrel world can also be a new territory for established racehorse stallions. “Dash Ta Fame is a perfect example,” says Jeff Tebow, general manager of the Oklahoma City-based Heritage Place sale company, about the veteran First Down Dash stallion. “He has been a great sire of racehorses, but there are many people who also look at his offspring for barrel racing. His racing offspring have earned about $15 million on the track, but he has also been a top barrel futurity sire for years.” Another example can be found in Royal Shake Em, a stallion who sired the earners of more than $8 million on the racetrack and who stands at Ronnie and Bonnie Stewart’s Double S Farm near Holland, Texas. “To be honest, the barrel end of this just fell into my lap,” says Ronnie. “A lady pulled up here one day named Kelly Yates with a mare named Firewater Fiesta. I didn’t know who she was or who the mare was, so she was telling me about her mare and how she wanted to breed to a stallion with an excellent mind. So she ended up breeding to Royal Shake Em.”
It turns out that Kelly was a champion barrel racer and Firewater Fiesta was the 2000 and 2001 Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association-Women’s Professional Barrel Racing Association horse of the year. “Then all the top barrel people started breeding mares to him,” says Ronnie, who adds that Royal Shake Em’s first crop of foals from matings with barrel mares are 4 years old this year.
Dual-Purpose Stallions The barrel world can also be a new territory for established racehorse stallions. “Dash Ta Fame is a perfect example,” says Jeff Tebow, general manager of the Oklahoma City-based Heritage Place sale company, about the veteran First Down Dash stallion. “He has been a great sire of racehorses, but there are many people who also look at his offspring for barrel racing. His racing offspring have earned about $15 million on the track, but he has also been a top barrel futurity sire for years.” Another example can be found in Royal Shake Em, a stallion who sired the earners of more than $8 million on the racetrack and who stands at Ronnie and Bonnie Stewart’s Double S Farm near Holland, Texas. “To be honest, the barrel end of this just fell into my lap,” says Ronnie. “A lady pulled up here one day named Kelly Yates with a mare named Firewater Fiesta. I didn’t know who she was or who the mare was, so she was telling me about her mare and how she wanted to breed to a stallion with an excellent mind. So she ended up breeding to Royal Shake Em.”
It turns out that Kelly was a champion barrel racer and Firewater Fiesta was the 2000 and 2001 Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association-Women’s Professional Barrel Racing Association horse of the year. “Then all the top barrel people started breeding mares to him,” says Ronnie, who adds that Royal Shake Em’s first crop of foals from matings with barrel mares are 4 years old this year.
Jeff says it’s hard to quantify the exact impact of barrel horse buyers on the sale, but he thinks it’s still “fairly low” in the big picture. Even so, he stressed that barrel horse buyers are an important part of Heritage Place sales, and the company is entertaining the idea of sponsoring or creating a barrel horse futurity and derby, similar to what it already does on a much larger scale for racehorses, with the Heritage Place Futurity and Derby at nearby Remington Park. “To have a successful auction, you need to have several buyers competing for a horse, and ultimately that’s good for the industry,” he says. While more buyers make for better auction results, there can sometimes be pushback from racehorse breeders who hope to see their horses on the track and not in the arena. “There are some breeders who are disappointed when a barrel racer buys their horse,” he says. “If they are commercial racing breeders, they would love to see their horse go into race training and win a Grade 1 futurity because that adds value to their mare or stallion, but we’ve also seen that if a horse goes into the barrel world and is successful, then that can also increase the value of a mare or stallion. It would be nice to hand-place your horses and handpick your buyers, but that’s just not the case.”
There has always been some hesitation on both sides to embrace the other. There are racehorse breeders who don’t want to see their horses on barrels, and barrel racers who prefer to preserve their sport’s traditional bloodlines. “Some old-timers will say maybe the racehorses are a little too ‘hot,’ but you have to have that speed; barrel racing is just a controlled runaway,” says Jud Little, who stands seven stallions at his Jud Little Ranch near Ardmore, Oklahoma. While that resistance might never disappear entirely, it might be inevitable that flat racing and barrel racing become even more intertwined in the future. “You can either get on the bandwagon now or you can be behind the eight-ball when things really start blooming,” Ronnie says. “The fastest-growing part of the racing industry right now is the barrel industry.”
The purse money in barrel racing might not compare to the multimillion-dollar jackpots of racing’s rich futurities, but there is significant money to be won in the sport. That means its participants, including the 23,000 members of the National Barrel Horse Association, have money to spend at sales and on stallion breedings. “To me, it’s like a right-hand, left-hand type thing, and both industries should recognize that,” says Mary Ellen Hickman, president of Future Fortunes Inc., a stallion incentive program for barrel horses. “We used to never see a straight barrel horse in the Heritage sale, and now we are starting to. In times like this, it helps to have more than one avenue to sell a horse. As long as we work together, it can help both sides.”