Invincible Spirit and Kodiac Bloodlines Producing Strong Stallion Prospects

Breeders connected to the Invincible Spirit and Kodiac families are sitting on an unusually rich crop of stallion candidates, with the Frankel colt Oxagon leading the conversation and Sajir drawing attention for the quality of his dam-line. The pipeline speaks to the enduring commercial dominance of two sires who, despite arriving at stud from very different positions, have reshaped European juvenile sprinting over the past two decades.

Oxagon is the most immediately compelling case. A Sandown novice winner trained by John and Thady Gosden for Prince Faisal, he finished runner-up in the G2 Champagne Stakes at Doncaster to Puerto Rico, the Wootton Bassett colt, with Gewan behind him that day. The fact that Gewan subsequently went on to win the G1 Dewhurst Stakes gives Oxagon's runner-up effort considerable retrospective weight. He has since scored over seven furlongs and holds a 2,000 Guineas entry, but his pedigree, drawn from the family that produced both Invincible Spirit and Kodiac, carries speedier elements than his classic entry suggests. Ted Voute, speaking to Emma Berry, noted that the horse's physique points in the same direction. "Andre says that he thinks that he is better on a straight track or over a straight six furlongs," Voute said. "I think we're going to run him on straight tracks from now on, and he might run him at the beginning of April in Deauville. His long-term target is to try to win a Group 1 in England, so if there is a stallion career there, that would at least put him on the radar of the stallion men."

Sajir, meanwhile, brings pedigree credentials that stallion men find hard to ignore. His dam Simple Magic, a Group-placed daughter of Invincible Spirit, traces back to the influential Niarchos mare Coup De Folie, a line that has consistently produced high-class horses. As Voute's interview noted, "there is certainly plenty to recommend Sajir as a stallion prospect, not least his excellent dam-line."

The broader context on the track reinforces how deeply these bloodlines are embedded in current European racing. At the Curragh on March 15, Breaking Dawn, a three-year-old colt by Twilight Son trained at Cheveley Park Stud, broke his maiden over six furlongs in 1:21.72. His dam On Her Toes is by Kodiac, the connection to the core bloodline direct and deliberate. Breaking Dawn had sold for 45,000 guineas as a yearling and 47,000 guineas as a two-year-old before making the winner's enclosure. Also at the Curragh on March 15, Ribee, a four-year-old Ribchester gelding trained by Michael Mulvany for the Lee Regan Partnership, won the six-figure handicap over a mile on heavy ground, clocking 1:49.38. He had been bought for just €4,500 as a weanling RNA and now carries a lifetime record of $103,259 in earnings.

At Saint-Cloud the same day, the Prix Omnium II Listed produced a first black-type win for Elastic, a Lope De Vega colt owned and bred by Wertheimer et Frere and ridden by Maxime Guyon. The runner-up, Zambezi, trained by Tim Donworth for owner-breeder Anita Wigan, is out of Mersey by Kodiac, another reminder of how consistently the Danehill son threads through the European breeding ecosystem.

That consistency has deep roots. Invincible Spirit's connection to Cheveley Park runs through Hooray and Rosdhu Queen, winners of the Cheveley Park Stakes in 2010 and 2012. Kodiac, a three-parts brother by Danehill to Invincible Spirit, matched that record by siring the 2014 winner Tiggy Wiggy, who won six of her eight starts as a two-year-old, including the Lowther Stakes. When she was offered at the end of her racing career, M V Magnier bid 2,100,000 guineas to secure her. Kodiac further populated the Cheveley Park results with Madeline, third behind Clemmie in 2017, Besharah, third to Lumiere in 2015, and Terror, fourth in 2014 when Invincible Spirit's daughter High Celebrity finished third in the same race.

The inbreeding patterns that have emerged from these lines produce striking results in both directions. Hellbent, a six-furlong Group 1 winner in Australia, is inbred 3 x 3 through Invincible Spirit and champion New Zealand stallion Volksraad. Barraquero carries 3 x 3 inbreeding via Invincible Spirit and Oasis Dream. Monitor Closely won the Group 2 Great Voltigeur with 2 x 4 inbreeding to Green Desert, though the analysis is pointed: that configuration "clearly didn't inject speed." Havana Grey is described as arguably the best representative of Green Desert inbreeding to date.

None of this was predictable when Invincible Spirit retired to the Irish National Stud in 2003 at a fee of €10,000, when most breeders considered him little more than a source of commercial cheap speed. He shuttled to Chatswood Stud in Victoria from 2003 through 2006, with the diminutive filly Yosei winning three Group 1 races from his southern hemisphere crop. The longer-term legacy from those shuttles is I Am Invincible, who graduated from sprinter to a stallion that finished second behind Snitzel in the General Sires' Table and was occupying the same position in the following season's rankings. His first two-year-old to win a feature race in Britain was Spoof Master, who took the Brocklesby Stakes at the end of March 2006. Kodiac, who never won a black-type race as a runner, has since established himself as one of the most reliable sires of precocious juvenile sprinters in the world.

With Oxagon eyeing a potential Group 1 campaign in England and Sajir's dam-line offering the kind of blue-chip breeding that stud farms covet, the families seeded by Invincible Spirit and Kodiac show no sign of running out of material worth discussing in the stallion ring.