Following an interview with Guy Harwood to mark the 40th anniversary of Dancing Brave's Classic season, we examine the horse's stud career in Britain and Japan By Emma Berry“Neither of us thought we'd ever get another horse like him,” says Grant Pritchard-Gordon, former racing manager to Prince Khalid Abdullah in the early days of Juddmonte and, crucially, through the 1986 tour de force of Dancing Brave. “Then I remember when Frankel won his Guineas, I was in the box with Prince Khalid and I said to him, 'I never thought I'd ever say this but that horse is better than Dancing Brave.' And he said, 'I didn't think I'd say that either.'”The living wonder that is Frankel will of course be remembered as Prince Khalid's crowning glory as an owner-breeder. Despite the fact that he has covered big books of quality mares since his arrival at Banstead Manor Stud in 2013, Frankel was still not guaranteed to be the influential stallion he has become.Entwined in excellence but representing two starkly different eras, Dancing Brave and Frankel will likely always be among the first names mentioned when looking back over the decades of top horses to have carried the Juddmonte silks. On the racecourse they were each responsible for inspiring a generation of devout followers. Plenty of the older vintage will shuffle off this mortal coil swearing that Dancing Brave was the best they've ever seen, and who could argue with that assertion? That's the wonderful thing about racehorses: that capability to ignite such passion. As we see all too often in the bloodstock world, however, even the biggest names have it all to prove once more upon entering the stallion ranks, as will be the case over the next few seasons for the likes of Baaeed and Stradivarius. On the flipside, there have been some unlikely heroes among the great stallions: for every tried-and-tested Sea The Stars there is a lightly-raced Danzig who reminds us that racecourse performance does not always equate to prepotency in the breeding shed. It is now almost unthinkable that Juddmonte, whose stallion yard is filled with homebreds bar the foal purchase Chaldean, would sell a colt of Dancing Brave's repute to another stallion operation. Rainbow Quest was the new Juddmonte stallion in the year in which Dancing Brave trailed clouds of glory behind him down the racecourse. During that season a deal was struck between Prince Khalid and his fellow owner-breeder Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum to stand Dancing Brave at the latter's Dalham Hall Stud in Newmarket. “Prince Khalid sold half of him after the Guineas to Sheikh Mohammed and I never really understood why,” says Pritchard-Gordon. “Prince Khalid and Sheikh Mohammed weren't close, but there was a lot of mutual respect and Prince Khalid had some businesses in Dubai. “He was a businessman and a trader and he knew what he had to invest and what he wanted to do. He was a remarkably more willing seller than people realised.”The news of this arrangement was announced after Dancing Brave's narrow Derby defeat. The son of leading American sire Lyphard was valued at £14m and was syndicated among breeders with 16 shares available at £350,000 each. His opening stud fee of £120,000 was the equivalent of roughly £352,000 nowadays and it is worth remembering that even the leading stallions of the time covered no more than 50 mares per year in the days before stallions were shuttled between the hemispheres.Tolly Considine, now best known around Newmarket as a successful florist, spent 20 years at Dalham Hall Stud working in the stallion yard under Alec Notman and Ken Crozier. At the age of just 20, he was asked to look after his first stallion: none other than Dancing Brave. “It was very thrilling,” he recalls. “When Alec asked me to look after the horse, to start with I remember just being completely and utterly overwhelmed. I rang my parents to tell them.”He continues, “Of course, the day he arrived from Guy Harwood's to Dalham, there was quite a lot of press interest, and a lunch was put on in the boss's house which we were all asked to.” Tolly Considine with Dancing Brave at Dalham Hall Stud | John Berry Back in the 1980s, residents of the villages around Dalham Hall Stud were treated to the extraordinary sight of the stallions being walked in hand around the local lanes.“We walked around Newmarket and Cheveley, or we'd go up Duchess Drive to Saxon Street and all the way down to Kirtling and Upend, back past Banstead Manor,” says Considine, who later looked after Arazi, Lycius and Halling among others. “Back in the day, Ken, John [Booth] and I would head off with Dancing Brave, Shareef Dancer and Top Ville. We did proper walks, but there wasn't the traffic then that there is now, and people kind of expected to see us.”He adds of Dancing Brave, “He was just an amazing, gentle, kind horse, and he was very easy to look after.”Considine's words echo those of Guy Harwood in describing how straightforward Dancing Brave was to train, but sadly it was not all plain sailing for the horse at stud. After covering his first book of mares in 1987, Dancing Brave began to suffer from a condition known as Marie's Disease which can cause painful swelling in a horse's limbs, leading to lameness. His fertility was also affected.“He became very ill,” says Considine. “All the great vets at the time were looking at him and they did get on top of it. He was then on medication for the rest of his life.”From 36 foals in his first crop born in 1988, Dancing Brave's largest tallies came in 1994 and 1995 when he had 50 and 51 recorded foals, but by that time he had long since left Britain for Japan. With those around him losing faith after some mediocre results in his early years, an offer was accepted for Dancing Brave to stand at the Shizunai Stallion Station, run by the Japanese Bloodhorse Breeders' Association (JBBA).You don't know what you've got til it's goneThe lyrics of Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi may have been ringing in the ears of a few of Dancing Brave's former shareholders following his departure from Newmarket. He covered his first book in Hokkaido in 1992. Later that year emerged his first Group 1 winner, when Ivanka won the Fillies' Mile for Clive Brittain and Ali Saaeed. Tragically, she succumbed to a training injury that same season but Ivanka was far from the only star from Dancing Brave's crop of 1990.In 1993, the sire delivered a Classic double for Prince Khalid when Commander In Chief won the Derby and Wemyss Bight landed the Irish Oaks. Commander In Chief would go on to win the Irish Derby and later joined Dancing Brave at stud in Japan at the Yushun Stallion Station. As a broodmare, Wemyss Bight produced Beat Hollow, who was third in Sinndar's Derby before winning the Grand Prix de Paris and initially becoming a Juddmonte stallion. He now lives in retirement at Ballylinch Stud.Also in 1993, Commander In Chief and Wemyss Bight were backed up by the Derby Italiano winner White Muzzle, who went close to emulating his sire in the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe when finishing second, beaten a neck by the great Urban Sea.Japan couldn't get enough of the Dancing Brave sire-line and White Muzzle also ended up in the country at the Shadai Stallion Station on the culmination of his racing career.When Dancing Brave first moved to Japan he had a familiar face alongside him as he settled in to his new surroundings with Considine having been asked to accompany him to ensure a smooth transition. “I was there for six weeks, which was just to make sure he was alright and to administer the medication he had in his food every day. Then I had to leave him, which was really hard,” he says. “It was an honour and a privilege to look after him, as it was with all the other great horses that came through our hands.”For all that Dancing Brave will be remembered as one of the greatest horses of all time, it is fair to say that his stallion career could not match his racing days. Not many stallions reach those dizzy heights, but then not many sire a Derby winner either, so for that achievement alone Dancing Brave must be lauded. Dancing Brave's Derby-winning son Commander In Chief | Racingfotos His daughter Cherokee Rose, trained in France by John Hammond, added some diversity to his stud record when winning the G1 Haydock Sprint Cup and G1 Prix Maurice de Gheest for Sheikh Mohammed. She gained an extra feather in her cap as the dam of Moyesii, who produced the St Leger winner Mastery. The Group 2 winner and late stallion Cable Bay hails from the same family, his dam Rose De France being another daughter of Cherokee Rose. Through eight seasons at the JBBA, Dancing Brave left his mark on the Japanese breeding scene, too. He sired two winners of the Oka Sho (Japanese 1,000 Guineas) in T.M. Ocean and Kyoei March, as well as G1 Takamatsunomiya Kinen winner King Halo and G1 Queen Elizabeth II Cup winner Erimo Chic.His name will doubtless linger on in Japanese pedigrees as his son King Halo, himself sire of a Yushun Himba (Japanese Oaks) winner, also features as the broodmare sire of the brilliant Equinox, who will be given every chance to succeed at stud.In a feature in TDN last year to mark the 70th anniversary of the JBBA, Dr Shigeki Yusa, general manager of the Shizunai Stallion Station, spoke to Nancy Sexton of his fondness for the stud's former resident.He said, “Dancing Brave stands out for both his presence and achievements. He was one of Europe's all-time greats, earning a then-historic rating of 141. When he retired in 1987, he entered stud in the UK with sky-high expectations – reflecting his immense appeal as a stallion prospect.”Yusa added, “Even within the JRA [Japan Racing Association], there was a debate over the idea of acquiring a horse with a known health issue. But shortly after, his third crop produced Commander In Chief, winner of the Epsom and Irish Derby, Irish Oaks winner Wemyss Bight and White Muzzle, who won the Italian Derby and ran second in the Arc, demonstrating the risk of judging a stallion's success too early.” Quite so.It could be argued that as of now Dancing Brave's greatest relevance in pedigrees is as the damsire of a particular Juddmonte luminary. Through his daughter Hope, Dancing Brave's genes blended splendidly with those of his old foe Green Desert in the making of the top sprinter Oasis Dream, now an accomplished stallion and broodmare sire in his own right. Dancing Brave was only 16 when he died of a heart attack in Japan on August 2, 1999. As a yearling, he was on the small side and was remembered by Pritchard-Gordon as having toed out quite significantly, and he was of course famous for his parrot mouth which he passed on to some of his stock.For all the judging and the criticism that young horses are subjected to at the sales, he is just one reminder that the only way to assess a horse's true ability is on the racecourse. How magically the heart, mind, lungs and limbs will combine can never be known until put to that test, and it was one which Dancing Brave passed with flying colours, time after glorious time. If you missed yesterday's interview with Guy Harwood on Dancing Brave's racing career you can read it here. The post Brave in Adversity: From Champion Racehorse to Stallion appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.