Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Heidi said:

> By and large the horses in Poland today are bred for
> the European halter market, not for any athletic endeavor.
This may be true for many of the horses we see today from Poland (since
mostly it is show breeders who go there and are willing to spend the
money to bring the horses back from there), but it isn't true for all
the horses bred in Poland.  The Poles DO still performance test their
horses by racing them, so if I were to go to Poland looking for a good
horse, I would want to be looking at race records.

> If I were to shop for Polish horses with athletic ability, I
> would stick to American Polish breeding, and would
> look for pedigrees heavy on pre-World War II breeding.
You don't need to look for pre-World War II imports, all you have to do
is look for pre-Bask imports :).  Bask came from a long line of
successful Polish race Arabians; however, he was a washout on the track
himself, so the Poles sold him off (i.e. he was a Polish cropout :)).
And then Gene Lecroix (a marketing genius if ever there was one),
imported him to America and redefined the American Arabain halter horse
and subsequently show horse, and the Poles were only too willing to sell
the rest of their crop outs to Americans for exhorbitant sums of money
:) :), and then to start producing them on purpose as well, especially
after the American Arabian halter horse standard migrated across the
Atlantic to Europe.

However, these aren't the only horses that have been imported from
Poland, even post-Bask.  One of the most prominent racing sires/sire
lines in Arabian racing in America today is the Polish import *Wiking
(and he appears in a number of endurance horse pedigrees too).

Ironically, both *Wiking and *Bask come from the same sire line, the
Polish stallion Witraz, who is a son of Ofir, who was also the sire of
*Witez II (as well as Wielki Szlem who is also prominent in the pedigree
of successful Polish race horses).  However, this information will be of
no help in looking at pedigrees of what the Poles are breeding today,
since the Ofir line will be all over the pedigree of all of their
horses, so it will tell a prospective buyer little about whether a horse
will be successful in endurance.

This, BTW, is going to be true of any Polish lines of successful
endurance horses in the US today.  The shared ancestors are going to be
too far back to tell you much about the performance capability of any
current individuals.  There may be some people in the US who can tell
her about what the Poles are currently breeding that is racing
successfully (and those horses will share most of the same bloodlines as
the ones they are breeding for the halter market and will share most of
the same bloodlines that are being used both in the halter market here
in the US and in the racing lines here in the US).  If there is, that is
the information she should be looking for.

Steph's successful endurance horse Great Santini is "pure Polish" and
comes from the *Bask sire line (and, BTW, is by US National Champion
halter stallion MS Santana); however, his success comes from the extent
to which he does not resemble his sire (which is probably why he ended
up at the killers, litterally), but is, instead a "throw back" to some
of his earlier ancestors :).

If I were going to Poland today to look for endurance horse potential, I
would ask to see their current racing records and would not rely on
seeing any familiar names in the pedigree, since those familiar names
are going to appear in the pedigree of ALL the horses.

kat
Orange County, Calif.



============================================================
There are few places where the horse does not fit in; at least in my world,
as delusional as that one may be.
~  Howard Bramhall

ridecamp.net information: http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/

============================================================