When Tiger Hill joined the Darley roster in advance of the 2006 covering season, he did so as a proven stallion, having already produced numerous talented sons and daughters during his time in Germany at Gestut Schlenderhan. His first Darley-produced offspring are now three-year-olds; and, while his impact with these horses has not been immediate, the facile victory of Rewilding in the Cocked Hat Stakes at Goodwood, which stamped the colt as a genuine Derby contender, served as a reminder that Tiger Hill is indeed a reliable source of Classic horses. At the same time, his older German-conceived stock have been continuing to remind us of Tiger Hill’s merit, most recently with the five-year-old Abbashiva and the nine-year-old Young Tiger giving him a continental stakes race double on the last Saturday in May, writes John Berry.
Although Tiger Hill comes with the strong recommendation of being a son of Danehill, he is far from a typical son of the deceased super-sire. Danehill, of course, was not merely a source of short-distance and precocious gallopers – witness the list of his best offspring including the Derby winner North Light, the Irish Derby winner Desert King (who has the distinction of having produced both the triple Melbourne Cup winner Makybe Diva and the Ascot Gold Cup winner Mr Dinos in his first crop in 1999) and the outstanding stayer Westerner. However, it is as the sire of very fast horses that Danehill principally made his name; and as a sire of sires Danehill is most synonymous with producing stallions whose stock excel at shorter distances. If such horses are indeed typical of Danehill’s stock, Tiger Hill, then, is very much an exception, initially for having excelled at 2400m and subsequently for siring so many horses who appear best suited at similar distances.
Even allowing for the fact that Danehill did make a remarkable ascent up the stallions’ ladder of popularity once he had demonstrated a startling ability to sire high-class horses from a wide variety of mares, it is worth noting that he was never actually on the lower rungs: a top-class sprinter/miler with a mouth-watering pedigree, he was never a cheap stallion even at the outset of his career, when his initial fee was 25,000 Irish guineas. Bearing this in mind, it appears likely that Tiger Hill’s dam The Filly was, certainly at the time of the mating, seemingly one of the least distinguished mares ever to visit him.
Owned by Gestut Wittekindshof, The Filly visited Danehill in Ireland in 1994 during the stallion’s fifth season at stud. At the time, Danehill’s first crop had just turned three, and his results in the northern hemisphere were promising. He had had the dual Group-winning Italian juvenile Fred Bongusto amongst his first two-year-old runners in 1993; and Kissing Cousin, who would provide him with his first northern hemisphere Group One victory by landing the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot in June 1994, had been Group One-placed at two. A further indication of Danehill’s merit, of course, came in Australia around the time of Tiger Hill's conception, when Danzero, a member of Danehill's first Australian crop, landed the 1994 Golden Slipper. It seemed a bold move to spend a large amount of money on a nomination for The Filly, who came from a German family which regularly produced its share of winners, but rarely at the higher levels.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of The Filly was her name. One would like to think that her nomenclature was inspired by the ways of the 5th Earl Of Glasgow (1792-1869) whose place in the history books is secure thanks both to his legendary temper (on one occasion in a hotel in Glasgow he picked up a waiter – who, he felt, had answered him abruptly – and threw him out of a first floor window, causing him serious injuries including a broken leg) and to his aversion to naming his horses. Even by the standards of an era when the naming of horses was a fairly haphazard business, Lord Glasgow was lax in the matter, to such an extent that one famous occasion supposedly saw the Jockey Club stewards insisting that he name three of his horses who had been racing quite regularly – his response is reputed to have been to name them Give-Him-A-Name, He-Hasn’t-Got-A-Name and He-Isn’t-Worth-A-Name. One can imagine him, on being forced to select a name for one of his fillies, opting for ‘The Filly’!
Whatever the origins of her name, however, The Filly was a decent racehorse. A daughter of Appiani (best known as the sire of the German-trained Star Appeal, who won the 1975 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at three-figure odds before retiring to the English National Stud and becoming a sire of, among other good horses, the champion NZ-based stallion Star Way) and a Dutch Cesarewitch winner, The Filly won four races between 2000m and 2200m. Of her several decent relatives, arguably the best was Tigerin, champion three-year-old filly in Germany in 1965 before beginning a decent career as a broodmare which saw her produce Townsman who, like The Filly’s dam Tigress Silver, landed the Dutch Cesarewitch, a long-distance race which one has to assume was formerly of more importance than is the case nowadays (if indeed it still exists). Ultimately The Filly would produce ten foals, nine of whom would race and five of whom would win – but, while this is a respectable family, Tiger Hill stands head and shoulders above the rest of it.
Owned by Baron Georg von Ullman of Gestut Schlenderhan, Tiger Hill went into training as a two-year-old in 1997. He joined the stable of former German champion jockey Peter Schiergen, who had taken over the operation of his recently-retired former boss Heinz Jentzsch. Schiergen was still race-riding in 1997 and duly partnered the colt in his three races that year, all of which he won. These included two Listed races, and at the end of the year it was fair to regard Tiger Hill as Germany’s best juvenile of the season. By the following spring, Schiergen had retired from race-riding and expatriate British jockey Billy Newnes took the mount on Tiger Hill. Together the partnership won its first three races: a Listed races and two Group Two contests. The merit of this form was obvious as, in the two Group Two races, there was strong overseas representation. His win in the Mehl-Mulhens-Rennen (Germany’s equivalent of the 2,000 Guineas) over 1600m saw him defeat the high-class UK-trained Docksider, with three more British raiders (the former Group One-winning juvenile Princely Heir, the Godolphin representative Bintang and the subsequent Group Two winner Trans Island) out of the first three; while his win in the Grosser Muller Brot-Preis over 2000m saw him defeat the Ian Balding-trained Scorned, who won a Listed race at Newbury later that year. Disappointingly, Tiger Hill lost his unbeaten record on his seventh start when finishing only tenth in the German Derby, but he put that below-par effort behind him later in the year when landing Germany’s premier weight-for-age race, the Group One Grosser Preis von Baden over 2400m, defeating Caitano by four lengths.
As a four-year-old, Tiger Hill fared even better, his three wins in 1999 consisting of two Group One victories (over 2000m and 2400m) and one Group Two success. Furthermore, he showed top-class form abroad, finishing second of ten behind the Japanese champion El Condor Pasa in the Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud and fifth of 14 behind Montjeu, El Condor Pasa, Croco Rouge and Leggera in an typically competitive Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. He thus ended both the year and his racing career as the winner of 10 of his 17 races and justifiably regarded as one of the best horses ever to have been trained in Germany. He duly retired to Gestut Schlenderhan in 2000 as a very exciting prospect.
Tiger Hill did extremely well from the outset in Germany. The two-year-old racing programme in Germany is very limited, so his score of one stakes-winning juvenile (Attilia) from his first crop of two-year-olds in 2003 was respectable. Even better were his results in 2004, when his eldest offspring were three-year-olds. He was represented by eight individual stakes winners that year. Six of these were three-year-olds - Saldentigerin, Mister Sacha (winner of a Group Three race in France), El Tiger, Attilia, Qsar, and Elopa – while two were juveniles, with Idealist winning a 1600m Listed race in Germany and Konigstiger landing Italy’s top two-year-old race, the Group One Gran Criterium in Milan. This victory cemented Tiger Hill’s status as one of Europe’s up-and-coming young sires, and it also saw a Group One quinella for the stallion as Idealist finished second – a quinella which was shared by Gestut Schlenderhan, which owned and bred both colts, and by Schiergen, who trained them both.
Both Konigstiger and Idealist trained on to register Group race victories as three-year-olds in 2005, in which year Tiger Hill sired his second Group One winner, courtesy of Iota (also trained by Schiergen for Gestut Schlenderhan) landing the Preis der Diana, Germany’s equivalent of the Oaks. Tiger Hill’s stud career was thus truly riding on the crest of a wave, as is shown by the fact that three weeks before Iota’s victory the announcement had been made that Sheikh Mohammed’s Darley stud operation had purchased the stallion from Gestut Schlenderhan. At that stage, Tiger Hill was Europe’s leading sire of the year by individual stakes winners (six) and was also able to boast a phenomenal 16% stakes winners to foals from his first crop.
In the modern era, it is virtually inconceivable that any stallion could be able to retain a figure of 16% stakes winners to foals indefinitely. Inevitably, therefore, Tiger Hill’s statistics have deteriorated since then, but even so his German-sired offspring still continue to do him proud – witness two of them, including a 9-year-old from his first crop, winning stakes races on the same day recently. To date, he has been represented by 13 individual Group winners from his six seasons (2000 to 2005 inclusive) at stud in Germany. He embarked on a period of shuttling to New South Wales after his recruitment to the Darley roster, which has seen him represented this year by the Australian-conceived but NZ-bred Posavina, a beautifully bred three-year-old filly who won this season's Group Three Lowland Stakes over 2100m in New Zealand.
All that remains now is for the stock produced by the plethora of high-class mares who have visited Tiger Hill under the Darley banner at Dalham Hall Stud – his first book was jam-packed with Group winners, dams of Group winners, daughters of Group winners and sisters to Group winners – to come up with some good horses. The signs are promising, with Rewilding (a son of the outstanding matriarch Darara, the half-sister to Darshaan who had already bred the Group One winners Darazari, River Dancer (hk) - Diaghilev, and Dar Re Mi, as well as the successful NZ-based sire Kilimanjaro) looking very good and with the likes of Padmini (a daughter of the multiple Group One winner Petrushka) having started their careers very promisingly. The future for Tiger Hill, whose stud fee has dropped to an eye-catchingly low 8,000 pounds, is currently looking very interesting indeed.
