The expression “Who’s your daddy?” is often used as a claim of dominance. In the case of the 1938 foals of Gäel, a champion...
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You have horses with great pedigrees, then you have those really blue-blooded horses … and then there is Florestan. Despite being...
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When Jean-Baptiste Bossuet looked at the yearling in September 1986, he wasn’t particularly impressed. There just was no...
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He was a war foal who rose to the top of the French elite in the 1920. The first and only horse to be disqualified from a win in...
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He was one of the best trotters the world has seen and went on to become an even better stallion before he died too soon. The...
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At 7 he was still a highly average trotter, clearly below the best in France. However, a Dutch trainer thought he saw something...
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She was the undisputed queen, not only of France but the whole world trotting. In fact, she was so superior that she was excluded from the betting in her 1967 Elitlopp elimination! Roquepine won races all over the world, at every track, distance and position. To top it off, she then gave birth to possibly the most influential stallion in French trotting history, Florestan.
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To many he appears to be an average American trotter bred to the first French trotting queen. However, the story of Great McKinney is that of a good horse who just needed a bit of time and then flourished in the US before he was sold to France. Together with French trotting queen Uranie he produced two talented trotters who turned out to be excellent stallions with a big legacy.
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The number of US-born stallions exported to Europe is staggering high, with very few horses going the other way for stallion duty. While some think European-born stallions in the US is a very recent thing, history shows that is not the case. In fact, the first European trotting stallion in the US arrived just a few years after the second World War. The story of Quel Veinard is both strange and fascinating, but more than anything also the story about an almost forgotten horse.
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The Franco-American cross is more popular than ever, and many in the US have also recognized the benefits of such a breeding. It’s often said the cross created a new breed (figuratively, not literally) in the 80s and 90s. Though there is some truth to that, the Franco-American cross was very popular much earlier than that. In fact, more than 100 years ago the French trotter (Trotteur Francais) could not compete with neither the American standardbreds nor the Russian orlov trotters. Then came a French-American cross to establish himself as the first French international star.
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