By Sid Fernando
Cairo Prince, a one-time winter book Kentucky Derby favorite, is the new horse at Airdrie Stud. The son of the surging young sire Pioneerof the Nile will stand for $10,000 in 2015 and is a great commercial bet at the price range. Here’s why:
For as long as it’s been around since the early 1970s, Governor and Mrs. Brereton C. Jones’s Airdrie, in Midway, Ky., has made a name for itself with moderately priced stallions. Some have had fashionable pedigrees, some haven’t, but common threads among these and other Airdrie horses through the years—an eclectic mix of sprinters, stayers, and turf  types like Silver Hawk, Key to the Kingdom, Guilty Conscience, Slew City Slew, Doonesbury, Far North, Divine Park, Indian Charlie, etc.—were race records and physiques first. It’s a formula that’s worked for Airdrie. The late Indian Charlie, by In Excess, an oddball sire for a Kentucky stallion, was perhaps the most successful of these Airdrie types. He entered stud moderately priced as a lightly raced colt with a reputation but by the time he died in 2011 at the age of 16, he’d risen to the top of the ranks and was much in commercial demand at a fee that had risen by many multiples from when he began. Uncle Mo, so outstanding at two in 2010, put the exclamation mark on a career for Indian Charlie that includes at least 77 other stakes winners to date.
Cairo Prince, a grey who gets his coat color from his stakes-winning and graded-placed dam Holy Bubbette, a daughter of the outstanding grey Holy Bull, is a top physical specimen. He’s from the first crop of Pioneerof the Nile, an Empire Maker horse who started off at $20,000 in 2010 (but will cover at $60,000 in 2015). Pioneerof the Nile’s first auction yearling colts averaged $87,000 in 2012 but Cairo Prince’s sheer physicality—not pedigree; despite the race record of his dam, the family is old and not particularly commercially fashionable—made him the most expensive of 31 sold that year, at $250,000.
He ran to his looks, too, winning Aqueduct’s  Nashua-G2 at a mile at two after a successful 6-furlong debut in a Belmont maiden special. He closed out his juvenile season at Aqueduct with a nose second to Honor Code in the 9-furlong Remsen-G2 and announced himself as a serious classics contender as a staying New York-based two-year-old trained by Kiaran McLaughlin.
After winning the 8.5-furlong Holy Bull-G2 on his season debut at Gulfstream in January, Cairo Prince became a Derby talking horse and McLaughlin’s major client, Godolphin, came calling, purchasing majority interest in the colt from the partnership group that had purchased him at auction and raced him, no doubt on the high recommendation of the trainer. Unfortunately, Cairo Prince’s career ended after a fourth-place finish in his next start in the Florida Derby-G1, and he enters stud with a record of three wins and one second from five starts for earnings of $562,000.
Breeders Richard L. Elam and Katherine H. Elam almost certainly sent Holy Bubbette to Pioneerof the Nile in 2010 after the success of the mare’s 2007 filly Nonna Mia, who placed in the Frizette-G1 at two in 2009. Nonna Mia was sired by Pioneerof the Nile’s sire, Empire Maker.
Cairo Prince is distantly inbred 5×5 to Bold Ruler and has a pedigree that will be receptive to the major sire lines and to the ubiquitously inbred pedigrees to the Mr. Prospector and Northern Dancer lines in the mare population. Â His dam is devoid of Northern Dancer, Mr. Prospector, and Seattle Slew, so he should be fairly easy to mate on paper. His own sire has a G1 winner, American Pharoah, from the Storm Cat line (an A+++ nick), and Empire Maker has enjoyed considerable success from the A.P. Indy, Danzig, and Seeking the Gold lines. Â The Empire Maker/Seattle Slew cross, responsible for champion Royal Delta (from an A.P. Indy mare), is an A++ nick and a GeoNick A+++ for North America. Likewise, the Empire Maker/Danzig cross is an A nick and a GeoNick A+++ for North America. The Empire Maker/Seeking the Gold cross is an A+ nick and a GeoNick A++ for North America.
For more on Cairo Prince’s sire, Pioneerof the Nile, read this.
For more on GeoNicks, please see this.