By Frances J. Karon
In retrospect, it’s hard to believe that Fergus Galvin was able to purchase Safeen (War Front), at the time in 2022 an unnamed 2-year-old, for just $18,000. “Lucky place, right time,” Galvin said of the purchase on Friday, the day after Safeen, a Grade 3 winner last year, won the $500,000 One Dreamer S. at Kentucky Downs. “She just fell through the cracks.”
Trainer Eddie Kenneally’s addition of first-time blinkers to sharpen her up helped Safeen get her first win in five 2024 starts, after having run second in Laurel’s Dahlia S. and third in the G3 Old Forester Mint Julep S at Churchill earlier this year. In 2023, she’d won the G3 Pucker Up S. at Ellis Park as well as the Horseshoe Indianapolis H., and she’s close to $750,000 in earnings.
Galvin feels pretty lucky to have her, as it would seem—based on how little she cost—that he must have been the only person on the sales grounds who saw the potential in this filly by a high-end sire but with a light pedigree up close. “What a little success story she’s been,” he said, a story set in motion when breeder Shadwell Farm’s principle Sheikh Hamdan passed away in 2021.
After Sheikh Hamdan’s death, the executors of his estate began a systematic offloading of the majority of the stock the sheikh had built up over 35+ years in the industry. Safeen, or ’20 Tafaneen as she was then, was one of 21 Shadwell 2-year-olds entered under the Bluewater Sales consignment at 2022 Keeneland January. By sale time, 18 of those 2-year-olds were scratches, as Shadwell had been selling them privately off the farm, but Safeen was one of the three to make it to the sales ring, along with Savvy On Blanc, a Kitten’s Joy colt (now gelding) sold for $37,000 who’s been second once in eight starts, for $6,313 in earnings; and Napoleon’s War, a War Front colt (also now a gelding), sold for $20,000, with three wins netting his connections $65,955. Safeen at $18,000 was the least expensive.
Granted, despite the investment in a War Front season—Claiborne’s flagship sire stood for $250,000 the year Safeen and Napoleon’s War were conceived—Safeen essentially cataloged with two blank dams (see below). First dam Tafaneen (Dynaformer) was unplaced in six starts from two to four in England, and the sale page reflected that Tafaneen had produced three winners, all minor, from five foals. Second dam Cozzy Corner (Cozzene) was a good racehorse—she’d won the G3 Valley View S. at Keeneland in 2001—but had no black-type horses from her nine foals.
Enter Safeen, then a 2-year-old who went under the hammer with little to no reserve at a sale where there’s not a huge market to begin with for racing prospects that aren’t already in active training and ready to go, let alone unbroken, as Safeen was. “We just took a chance,” said Galvin, who races the 5-year-old with Rebecca Hillen, the wife of English bloodstock agent Stephen Hillen. The final bid falling at $18,000 was a pleasant surprise, as Galvin says that the partners had been willing to go “a lot more” for her if they had to.
Despite the lean circ*mstances of the first two dams, there were plenty of positive signs, both to the composition of the filly’s pedigree and her female family.
As far as the pedigree components go, War Front had even then already sired three stakes winners (one at group level) from Dynaformer mares—Safeen is now one of five, three of which are group/graded winners, on the direct cross. And there were three War Front stakes winners under third dam The Bink, whose daughter Riskaverse, by Tafaneen’s sire Dynaformer, is the granddam of three stakes-winning full brothers: G1 winner Fog of War (now a stallion in Turkey), Invader (who bred his first mares in 2024, standing at Pegasus Stud in New Jersey), and Naval Intelligence, all out of Say (Galileo). Safeen is the fourth stakes winner by War Front under her first three dams, and Dynaformer appears in all four.
SAFEEN (2020 War Front – Tafaneen, by Dynaformer)
B: Shadwell Farm, LLC
O: Fergus Galvin and Rebecca Hillen
T: Eddie Kenneally
Record: 15-4-2-4, $737,224
Highest achievement: Grade 3 winner
Last Auction Price: $18,000 Keeneland January 2-year-old
Beyond those positives, the deeper pedigree behind Cozzy Corner is from one of the most successful female lines in the N. American Stud Book, none of which would have mattered much here and now if Safeen hadn’t injected some new life into this branch of the family that had all but gone dormant for some 20 years.
Safeen’s third dam The Bink (Seeking the Gold) was Grade 3-placed, and she produced three-time Grade 1 winner—including back-to-back Flower Bowls, in 2004 and 2005—Riskaverse (Dynaformer), that granddam of three War Front stakes winners.
The next dam Toll Fee (Topsider), who doesn’t appear on the catalog page, is where it begins to get really, really good. Toll Fee was a stakes-winning half-sister to six other stakes winners, including champion sprinter Plugged Nickle (Key to the Mint), who’d also won the Florida Derby and Wood Memorial, both Grade 1s; and Christiecat, winner of the G1 Flower Bowl in 1992, the same race Riskaverse won twice more than a decade later. Their dam—Safeen’s fifth dam—was 1991 Broodmare of the Year Toll Booth (Buckpasser), to whom Horse of the Year Havre de Grace (Saint Liam) and Belmont S. winner Tonalist (Tapit) trace. One more generation back—Missy Baba (Raja Baba)—is the family that produced Broodmare of the Year Weekend Surprise (Secretariat), the dam of Horse of the Year A.P. Indy (Seattle Slew), etc.
And now Safeen, the $18,000 filly who failed to turn many heads when she was offered for sale, is reinvigorating the Cozzy Corner branch.
By the way, “lucky place, right time” can only get you so far…Galvin was also the purchaser, on behalf of Marc Detampel, of another current and very inexpensively bought horse who has exceeded marketplace expectations, and that’s 2024 Grade 1 winner Nakatomi (Firing Line), who’s earned over $1 million. He was a $25,000 yearling, and like Safeen, he is based at Keeneland (with Wesley Ward).
A picture that’s worth three million dollars
Eddie Kenneally had a memorable Thursday at Kentucky Downs. Safeen’s stakes win was the highlight, but his other two entries ran second, including Outadore by a neck in his second start off the claim from Wesley Ward, who’d trained the gelding for all 18 of his previous starts. Outadore was less than $4,000 dollars shy of hitting the million-dollar earnings mark when Kenneally claimed him, and his second-place finish at Kentucky Downs pushed him well over the mark.
This photo from 2020 of six Wesley Ward-trainees (at the time) includes three 2-year-olds (and three older horses), and now that Outadore has passed the milestone, all three of the 2-year-olds have gone on to become stakes winners of more than a million: Next (Not This Time) on the far left is a three-time G2 winner; Outadore (Outwork), second from the right, is a three-time stakes winner; and Golden Pal (Uncle Mo), is a dual Breeders’ Cup winner.
Pretty cool, right?
Street Sense and Bernardini strike again
It often happens that when a horse retires to stud, breeders follow the patterns that have worked with the new stallion’s sire, and that formula has paid off for the connections of Chancer McPatrick. A Chad Brown-trainee who is now 2-for-2 after his win in Monday’s G1 Hopeful S. at Saratoga, Chancer McPatrick is from the first crop of Gainesway’s McKinzie (Street Sense), and his dam is by Bernardini, who is the broodmare sire of four graded stakes winners by Street Sense. Now that Bernardini is also the broodmare sire of the first Northern Hemisphere Grade 1 winner by a son of Street Sense, the success of the cross has gone one generation farther.
