Aureole Immediate Success As Sire

Press, Volume C, Issue 29624, 21 September 1961, Page 4

Aureole Immediate Success As Sire

Few classic sires in modem times have achieved such immediate success as Hyperion’s best son, Aureole, whose stock have been racing for only four seasons. Aureole is the sire of Aurelius, winner of. the English St. Leger at Doncaster last Saturday week.

■ To help make him the leading sire of winners this season his four-year-old son, Vienna, owned and bred by Sir Winston Churchill, won the Lyons Maid Stakes at the Variety Club of Great Britain’s charity meeting at Sandown Park the same day. Aureole’s first crop included St. Crespin in (Prix de I’Arc de Triomphe, Eclipse Stakes, etc.), while his second batch of foals yielded St. Paddy, whose victories in, test year's Derby and St. Leger gave him championship status.

Aurelius is Irish-bred. He was raised at the Tally Ho Stud and is out of Nidbe 11, an American-bred mare by Sir Galahad iin, which Captain Boyd-Rochfort bought on behalf of his sister, Mrs Muriel McCali, owner of the Tally Ho Stud. Aurelius was bought when a yearling by his trainer. Noel Murless, for 5000gns and later passed to the late Mr Tom Lilley, who made a present of him to his wife. He was carrying Mrs Lilley’s colours when he won the St. Leger.

Niobe II won three races at three years, is the dam. of two lesser winners in England, and is out of Humility, dam of a number of good winners and own sister by Hyperion to Hyeilla, winner of the New Oaks and Champion Stakes and dam of winners. Top Trainer With Aurelius contributing £29,817 to this season’s “haul” by winning the St. Leger, Noel Murless is virtually certain to win the British training championship for the third time in succession and the fourth in five years. Unlike the New Zealand system, training premiership

honours in Britain are calculated on money won. Murless’s total winnings this season are over £90,000 and he stands more than £25,000 ahead of his nearest rival, H. Wragg. But for the victory of Aurelius he might have had to concede the championship to his Newmarket neighbour. Lester Piggot, who rode a beautifully-judged race on Aurelius in the classic, is engaged in a dour battle with Australian “Scobie” Breasley for the jockeys’ championship, but it seems likely that he, like Murless, will end the year top of his department in the racing game.

Piggot is four or five vital pounds heavier than the Australian and few jockeys could concede what this means in terms of promising rides missed to such a skilled horseman as Breasley. Disappointments Apart from Aurelius, the stars of the powerful Murless stable this season • were St. Paddy and Petite' Etoile, winners of £20,572 and £7604 respectively for the year. But these two were also involved in two of the stable’s biggest disappointments. St. Paddy, considered one of the best colts to have run in England in recent years, was humbled by the French three-year-old chempion Right Royal in the £23,000 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot in July. Petite Etoile was defeated by Vienna in the £11,016 Aly Khan International Memorial Gold Cup at Kempton a fortnight earlier—a sad failure by the filly which the late Prince Aly Khan reckoned the best he had ever owned in the first running of a race instituted to perpetuate his memory.