Brody’s Cause is one of two sons of Giant’s Causeway for the Albaugh Family Stable to enter stud in Kentucky in 2017. He’ll stand at B. Wayne Hughes’s Spendthrift for $12,500 and is priced attractively for a dual G1 winner. The other, Not This Time, was covered here.
Dennis Albaugh, an Iowa billionaire, first got into racing in 2005 with the $42,000 OBS 2-year-old Miss Macy Sue, a Graded stakes winner who earned $880,915 and started what would later become the Albaugh Family Stable’s path to breeding. But in between, a detour honed the fledgling program’s focus for the classics. Albaugh was reportedly part of the racing partnership of fellow Iowan Jerry Crawford’s Donegal that campaigned Paddy O’Prado. Crawford buys horses for Donegal with strictly the classics in mind, and for him that means 10-furlong ability on the first weekend in May. Paddy O’Prado, a son of El Prado who cost $105,000 at Keeneland September in 2008, gave Donegal a run for the roses when a fast-closing third in the 2010 Kentucky Derby. Trained by Dale Romans, Paddy would go on to become a G1 winner and earner of $1.7 million and is now a stallion at Spendthrift.
The Paddy O’Prado blueprint, down to the trainer, is now part of the game plan for AFS, whose racing manager, Jason Loutsch, is Albaugh’s son-in-law. Brody’s Cause was a $350,000 Keeneland September buy in 2014, and he became the first G1 winner for the stable when he won the 2015 Breeders’ Futurity at Keeneland under Romans’s care. Meanwhile, the stable’s fledgling breeding operation with Miss Macy Sue was also paying dividends. Her second foal, a colt by Unbridled’s Song, had fetched $800,000 at the 2012 Keeneland September sale, and, later named Liam’s Map, he won the G1 Woodward and BC Dirt Mile in 2015 and gave AFS, in conjunction with Brody’s Cause, its first G1 winners as breeders and owners in the same year. Liam’s Map entered stud in 2016 at Lane’s End for $25,000 and has been a hot prospect.
Brody’s Cause, meanwhile, had AFS on the Derby trail. The colt finished his 2-year-old campaign with a third-place finish in the G1 BC Juvenile behind Nyquist, and he returned this spring to win the G1 Blue Grass. Brody’s Cause finished seventh in the Derby and was sixth in the Belmont in what would be his last start. He retires with a record of three wins from eight starts and $1,168,138 in earnings.
By this time, AFS had reloaded for the next year and appeared to have an even better classics prospect than Brody’s Cause in 2-year-old G3 winner Not This Time — a homebred son of Miss Macy Sue. Unfortunately, he made his last start, a second-place finish, in the G1 BC Juvenile and will enter stud at Taylor Made for $15,000.
Both Not This Time and Brody’s Cause descend tail-female from two blue hens. Not This Time traces directly to Tartan’s Aspidistra — the dam of Dr. Fager and Ta Wee. Brody’s Cause descends from Meadow Stud’s Imperatrice — the dam of Somethingroyal, whose most famous son was Secretariat. In fact, Brody’s Cause’s fifth dam, Speedwell, is closely related to the Triple Crown winner as she’s a Bold Ruler half-sister to Somethingroyal. [There’s a similarity in the pedigree constructs of the female lines of the two Albaugh Giant’s Causeway colts after the blue hens, because Not This Time’s fourth dam, Tweak, is by Secretariat out of Ta Wee (Dr. Fager’s half-sister), while Brody’s Cause’s fourth dam, Quick Cure, is by Dr. Fager from Speedwell (a three-quarter relative to Secretariat).]
Closer up, Brody’s Cause is from the Sahm stakes-placed winner of $397,730, Sweet Breanna, who was second in the Woodbine Oaks. She’d been purchased in foal to Congrats for $120,000 at Keeneland November in 2011 by Gabriel Duignan’s Foxtale Farm for the partnership of Duignan, William Arvin, Jr., and Petaluma Bloodstock — the breeders of Brody’s Cause and her subsequent foals.
Duignan, who’d restored and managed Castleton Lyons for Dr. Tom Ryan and was involved in Ryan’s purchase of 25 percent of Malibu Moon that brought him to Castleton Lyons from Maryland, is married to Aisling Duignan at Ashford, where Giant’s Causeway was the big horse in residence at the time. Mating Sweet Breanna to the leading son of Storm Cat made sense, not only by proximity, but by pedigree — it’s a great cross with Mr. Prospector, sire of Sahm — and physique. The resulting foal, Brody’s Cause, was consigned to Keeneland by Paramount, which is owned by Duignan and Pat Costello, ticked all the boxes, and made money.
From a buyer’s perspective, Brody’s Cause fit the bill for AFS as a potential Derby horse. Giant’s Causeway stayed 10 furlongs and got plenty of high-class horses that did, too. Sweet Breanna herself was a Canadian classic filly, and the immediate family included a combination of good American 2-year-olds like Cure the Blues and Sweet Roberta (second dam), as well as several European stakes winners, including Duke of Venice, first in the G3 Queen’s Vase at Ascot over two miles.
As a stallion prospect, Brody’s Cause has the racing credentials, looks, and pedigree to make his fee of $12,500 appealing, and his sire already has a number of sons, most notably Shamardal, who are keeping the line going, with other promising young horses still in the pipeline. It all bodes well for Brody’s Cause.
