Bloodlines Presented By Walmac Farm: Tarifa Lighting A Spark On Her Page

With a brave victory in the Grade 2 Rachel Alexandra Stakes at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, Tarifa put the spotlight on herself as one of the better fillies in this crop and made her sire and dam objects of increased interest.

Her sire Bernardini (by A.P. Indy) needs no introduction. The champion 3-year-old of 2006 became a leading sire whose best racers included G1 Travers Stakes winners Alpha and Stay Thirsty, as well as more than a dozen other G1 winners, including Art Collector (Woodward, Pegasus Invitational), Cavorting (Personal Ensign, Test), Rachel’s Valentina (Spinaway), To Honor and Serve (Woodward), and West Will Power (Stephen Foster).

On July 30, 2021, Bernardini was euthanized due to complications of laminitis. He was 18 years old. His final crop were foaled in 2022 and are 2-year-olds. Tarifa is from the stallion’s next-to-last crop and is his most recent stakes winner.

Raced by Godolphin and bred in Kentucky at their spacious holdings in the Bluegrass, Tarifa is out of the Awesome Again mare Kite Beach, who was unraced. Kite Beach is out of a very distinguished mare, Tizdubai, who is a graded stakes winner and a full sister to Horse of the Year Tiznow (Cee’s Tizzy) and two other stakes winners: Budroyale (four-time G2 stakes winner and earner of $2.8 million) and Tizbud.

With those relations and a fetching physical presence, Tizdubai brought $950,000 at the 2001 Keeneland November sale out of the Denali Stud consignment, agent for breeder Cee’s Stable LLC.

On the racetrack, Tizdubai won her only two starts as a juvenile for Godolphin and trainer Eoin Harty, including the G2 Sorrento Stakes at Del Mar. After the Sorrento, Tizdubai was found to have a condylar fracture in her right foreleg and was put away for the season.

The filly went abroad and raced twice in England the following year. She was sixth in the G3 Princess Elizabeth Stakes at Epsom and then seventh in the G1 Falmouth Stakes at Newmarket in 2004. Timeform did not give her a rating off those two efforts but described her as a leggy, attractive filly and reported that she had suffered a fracture to her left hock and was retired.

Tizdubai went to the paddocks with immense expectations, but her best runner on the evidence of the racetrack proved to be Madinat Jumeirah (Bernardini), who won three times in Bahrain, where he was champion 3-year-old colt. That, however, was not a very high bar and did not qualify for black type, according to the international cataloging standards as codified by the Society of International Thoroughbred Auctioneers.

As the colts did not carry the banners high, Godolphin chose to sell on the daughters of the mare, including the dam of Tarifa.

At the time of sale, Tarifa had a dam with no black type among her own produce, and her oldest daughter, the Storm Cat mare Genisa, had produced only a restricted stakes winner. So Kite Beach went to the 2021 Keeneland November sale while carrying her second foal to a cover by Bernardini. The mare’s foal of 2021, retained by Godolphin, was Tarifa.

Even with a quiet first dam, Kite Beach looked the part of a likely producer of quality at the sale and sold for $100,000 to M T Stables. Then, three months later, she went through the Fasig-Tipton February sale of 2022 and sold for $115,000 to Calumet Farm.

“One of the nice things about the purchase was that the mare foaled at the sale,” Calumet’s manager Eddie Kane said. “She’s a Fasig-Tipton-bred.

“Seriously, Kite Beach is a lovely mare, medium-sized, plenty of quality, and very nice to be around. She has the 2-year-old Bernardini filly that we sold as a yearling, has a yearling colt by Knicks Go, slipped to Lexitonian, and was bred to Cody’s Wish. We’ll check her this week for pregnancy.”

The boost to the Calumet operation comes because Godolphin chose to sell some of its stock. In the simplest terms, “You can’t keep them all,” the operation’s director of bloodstock Michael Banahan said of the sale.

Indeed, an operation the size of Godolphin, for instance, would need to buy up practically half of the Bluegrass just to house mares and foals if it kept all of its annual production of about 100 foals. Instead, Banahan said, “We’ll cover about 160 home mares, but a good number of those will then go through the sales, and we’re looking to keep around 120 to 130 broodmares so that we would have about 100 yearlings or 2-year-olds coming each year.”

In the case of Tizdubai and her offspring, when Kite Beach came to the Keeneland sale three years ago last November, it was an awfully quiet family. Only Genisa has a black-type winner. Now, how different the page looks. Kite Beach is the third daughter of Tizdubai to produce a graded performer.

In addition to Five Star Rampage (Quality Road), Genisa has a pair of Deep Impact stakes performers in Japan (Kaiser Barows and Grand Slam Ask); the younger Fancy Day (Shamardal) has Cabo Spirit (Pioneerof the Nile), who won the G2 Twilight Derby and G3 La Jolla Handicap, and the multiple stakes-placed Convention (Constitution); and Kite Beach has G2 winner Tarifa, who is the mare’s first foal.

The outlook is better and better for this branch of a fascinating family.