- (1st) Chacco-Blue (Chambertin / Contender)
- (2nd) Diamant de Sémilly (Le Tot de Sémilly / Elf III)
- (5th) Casall (Caretino / Lavall I)
- (4th) Mylord Carthago (Carthago / Jalisco B)
- (8th) Cardento (Capitol / Lord)
- (3rd) Toulon (Heartbreaker / Jokinal de Bornival)
- (9th) Nabab de Rêve (Quidam de Revel / Artichaut)
- (11th) Cornet Obolensky (Clinton / Hearbreaker)
- (7th) Kashmir vd Schuttershof (Nabab de Rêve / Tenor Manciais)
- (13th) Verdi (Quidam de Revel / Landgraf)
You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows, Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan sang, and indeed anyone who pays attention to the international jumping scene would probably come up with a top ten off the top-of-their-head that mirrored this one, without any of that fussing around with results and numbers. The numbers in the brackets are last year’s ranking, and we see that the only newcomer to the ten is Verdi…
Chacco-Blue reminds us yet again, how lucky the showjumping world was when Alwin Schockemöhle, then a member of the Oldenburg studbook, went to Normandy to look for a stallion. Alwin asked the Holstein breeding director, Maas J. Hell to join him on the trip to Normandy, and together they visited Xavier Ribard one of the first French breeders to stand a private stallion in competition to the state stud department.
Cor de la Bryère
Years later, Ribard remembered the visit: “They asked me if I could show them some other stallions. I had another four, which I showed them on the side of the road, as there were stables 10 kilometres away. They immediately pointed at Cor de la Bryère and asked if he was for sale. Because I had just received the advice to have him gelded by the director of Haras, I sold him there and then.” (article by Pascal Renauldon, Z magazine, February 1998)
Chacco-Blue is by Chambertin, which makes him a great great grandson of Cor de la Bryère, while Chambertin’s dam has another cross of the French import, she is an own daughter of ‘Corde’. Chacco-Blue is out of Contara, by Contender (another Corde grandson). Contara is out of Godahra by the Thoroughbred stallion, Godavari, who bred in Mecklenburg, where he produced one 1.50m jumper, one 1.40 and three 1.10.
Alois Pollmann-Schweckhorst rode Chacco-Blue throughout most of his career at Schockemöhle’s, and he thinks that mare line was a key element in the stallion’s genetic make-up:
“I think the outstanding feature of the mother line is the grand dam, a half bred mare, Godahra II, by the Thoroughbred, Godavari (Tudor Minstrel line),” Alois told me. “In the Eastern part of Germany she was very popular, she used to win a lot of 1.30m, 1.40m. She must have had really good sports spirit, because she was winning and many people were talking about her. She was small (167 cm) but she had a big heart and she was a fighter. I guess that this is a very strong part in Chacco-Blue’s bloodline. I believe that if you see the offspring of Chacco-Blue, almost 99% have a super technique, a big heart, a good attitude to work, and this might come from this very strong grand-mother.”
What does he give his progeny?
“He has given to the next generation a wonderful technique, front leg technique, and the most obvious thing is the positive attitude to the sport. Some of them horses, they might be a little bit delicate in the beginning, when they are young they are a little bit freaky, a little bit spooky, not really spooky, but their senses are 100%, what they hear, what they see, and it takes them a little while to settle. This is not a weakness, this is something that every good young horse has.”
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Diamant de Sémilly is another colossus in the world of jumping breeding, and he combines two of the great French jumping lines, Grand Veneur through his son, Diamant’s sire, Le Tot de Sémilly and Ibrahim, grandsire of his dam, Venise des Creses, through his son, Elf III. As with Chacco-Blue, the stallion on his final line is a bit more obscure, but the Thoroughbred, Amarpour did produce four 1.60 jumpers, one 1.50, and a four-star eventer.
The third placed Casall, was without doubt the greatest competitor of the three, Chacco-Blue was handy, but no superstar, and while Diamant was a key member of the Gold Medal winning team at the Jerez WEG and French Champion in 2002, it is Casall who has won some of the world’s great Grand Prix: Rotterdam, Falsterbo, Lyon, Zurich, Rome, London, Doha, Valkenswaard and Paris, and finished his career with a five-star win at Hamburg in 2017 with winnings of €2,722,518.
The final round, Casall wins at Hamburg and retires…
Looking at last year’s WBFSH top 20 jumping stallions, Gemma Alexander compiled a carefulness ranking; to do this we looked at the top-10 offspring of each ranked stallion, and worked out the proportion of clear rounds they have jumped of all their rounds at a height of 1.50m or higher. We only took results from the first round of competition, excluded Table C and Accumulator competitions, and accepted clear rounds with time as we are purely looking at carefulness. Again, this ranking is not perfect – none are! – however we think it is another pretty nifty way of ranking these stallions.
And really looking at the chart we are looking at this year’s Ten with Diarado and Berlin out replaced by Cornet Obolensky and Verdi. It was a surprise to see Cornet drop out last year, and it’s good to see the great stallion back in the Ten where he has appeared on numerous occasions over the past decade usually in the top five, while Verdi who was the mainstay of the Dutch team for many years, makes his way to 10th.
