The Legacy of El Prado
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By Frances J. Karon
From the town of Cashel in County Tipperary, Ireland, at Lyonstown Stud, sprang a stallion that launched a breeding operation for Canadian entrepreneur Frank Stronach and has left an unmistakable mark on Thoroughbred racing.
Raced, like his sire and dam before him, by Robert Sangster, El Prado was trained on the holy ground of Ballydoyle by the incomparable Vincent O’Brien.
A son of Sadler’s Wells, in his day the leading sire in Great Britain and Ireland a record 14 times, El Prado caught the attention of bloodstock agent Dermot Carty.
To appreciate what El Prado has accomplished, one must recognize the brilliance of his sire.
Sadler’s Wells entered stud in 1985 to immediate success. Over time, he became the sire of 294 stakes winners, including 14 individual Irish classic winners, 12 classic winners England, and three classic winners in France.
But it was El Prado, foaled in 1989 from the brilliant Lady Capulet, that would travel his talents to North America and find a home in Kentucky as the stud who made Stronach’s Adena Springs an award-winning force in racing.
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Charles O’Brien, an assistant to his father, trainer Vincent O’Brien, when El Prado was racing, looks back fondly on the young horse.
“He was not a very typical Sadler’s Wells and didn’t look like him,” recalled O’Brien. “Most of them were bay with white points, and he was grey and bigger and more substantial. Many were quite light-framed, but he was a big, heavy horse.”
O’Brien recalls putting a green El Prado through his paces.
“He wasn’t the two-year-old type but he had such a good constitution that we just kept moving him up in his work, and he thrived on it and just kept going, although he didn’t really have the physique of a sharp two-year-old,” said O’Brien.
El Prado at the Curragh
But familiarity through the bloodlines struck a chord and despite physical appearances, O’Brien knew that El Prado had a genetic right to be good young.
“We knew him well from scratch. He was out of a very good filly, Lady Capulet, which won the Irish Guineas first time out. We knew him all his life,” said O’Brien.
Blessed by pedigree, El Prado is a half-brother to Irish champion Entitled. El Prado made six starts in his juvenile campaign, including a score at first asking and a next-out win in the Group 3 John J. Long Memorial Stakes.
In his third career start, the Group 3 Anglesey Stakes, he came up against a monster in St. Jovite, who denied a stubborn El Prado by a desperate neck.
St. Jovite went on to win the Futurity en route to sharing year-end championship honors with El Prado. A year later, St. Jovite would win the Irish Derby.
Keeping El Prado, a horse already considered not your typical juvenile racing prospect, in form, however, was proving to be something of an issue.
“He was such a good eater it was hard to keep the weight off him. You had to give him a little more work than most, plus he wasn’t the greatest work horse in the world so it took a fair bit of graft to keep him fit,” said O’Brien.
If anything, that narrow loss to St. Jovite may have been the race to bring El Prado to top form. On September 7, 1991, El Prado made his Group 1 debut in the National Stakes at the Curragh. With Lester Piggott up, El Prado was expected to win, which he did by a half-length over Nordic Brief.
“The Group 1 National was his peak. It was very typical for him. He wasn’t a flashy horse; it was very much a grind for him. He wasn’t the type to quicken away in a matter of strides but he’d just grind other horses down through sheer power,” offered O’Brien.
El Prado traveled to England, where he was 12th of 30 runners in a valuable Tattersalls-sponsored race, before finishing out his juvenile season with a win in the Group 2 Beresford Stakes in Ireland.
“He took on whatever was around at the time as a two-year-old,” said O’Brien.
El Prado’s three-year-old campaign didn’t pan out as desired. From three starts, he mustered a fifth in the Group 3 Scottish Classic at Ayr and failed to impress in consecutive Group 1 tries in France.
“His first run back as a three-year-old was obviously disappointing,” admitted O’Brien. “We thought we had him back to somewhere near his best but he didn’t show any spark.”
Given the success of El Prado’s high-profile son Medaglia d’Oro, some might wonder what El Prado might have accomplished if given a chance on a natural dirt surface.
“It wouldn’t have happened (trying dirt) as a two-year-old anyway, and then he got hurt in the spring of his three-year-old year, he twisted an ankle basically and was never really right again afterwards, so it never became a possibility,” said O’Brien.
Instead, he prefers to hold onto the family ties to the great grey.
“It makes it that much more special to know (my father) had trained both parents and then him. That adds a bit of extra to it,” he said.
El Prado's racing career had come to a close, but his true calling was about to begin.
A native of Austria, Frank Stronach made his fortune as the founder of Magna International, an auto parts company in Aurora, Ontario, Canada. His Adena Springs Farm now stands multiple stallions in Canada and the U.S. -- in Ontario, Kentucky, and California -- but El Prado was the start of it all.
In 1993, Dermot Carty, equine consultant, bloodstock agent, and the man responsible for Stronach's Adena Springs North location, asked longtime friend and associate Edward Daly to provide a list of potential stallion prospects from the Sadler’s Wells line. Daly sent three names, including that of El Prado.
On paper, the horse’s two-year-old form was exceptional, but a closer analysis of his family line found many threads worth pulling.
“I started my research by going to Kentucky to speak to one of my mentors, Tom Gentry,” said Carty. “Tom had a great understanding of pedigrees and had bred Terlingua (the dam of Storm Cat), War and Peace, Pancho Villa, Royal Academy, and many more.”
Gentry’s analysis of El Prado, out of the grey Lady Capulet (by Sir Ivor, another horse trained by Vincent O’Brien), found that bringing the horse to North America might have precedent.
“Tom told me that El Prado had more of an American pedigree and when I asked him why, he said, ‘Well, Lady Capulet’s brother is a horse called Drone, who stood at Claiborne Farm and was very successful,’” smiled Carty.
Carty, in addition to his own keen eye, knew that the knowledge of the veteran horsemen that came before him was priceless and reached out to another friend and mentor in Arthur Stollery. A member of the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame as a builder, Stollery owned Angus Glen Farm and bred standouts such as fellow Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Famers Kennedy Road and Lauries Dancer.
At the time of Carty’s research, Stollery had two Drone mares on hand and Carty simply had to know why.
“He said, ‘Speed, unbelievable speed,’” recalled Carty with a shake of the head.
Carty recognized the potential, but was there opportunity? He worked the phones to his native Ireland and started to dig up all the information he could on his budding stallion prospect and the people who owned him.
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