For the third straight year and fifth time in the last six years, TAPIT is the sire of an Eclipse Award winner after undefeated Flightline took home the Horse of the Year and Older Dirt Male honors on Thursday night.
This is the second major award the son of TAPIT has won in the past week after he was crowned the Longines World’s Best Racehorse with a 140 rating on that international ranking list in London last week. The rating is the highest ever given to a dirt horse with the next highest being a 135 by Cigar in 1996. The rating is also the co-highest ever given to a racehorse alongside Frankel in 2012.
Flightline went undefeated in six starts with four straight Grade 1 victories spanning 10 ½ months from 2021 to 2022. Trained by John Sadler for Hronis Racing, Siena Farm, Summer Wind Equine, West Point Thoroughbreds, and Woodford Racing, Flightline recorded the second best ever Beyer Speed Figure in his 19 ¼ length Pacific Classic Stakes (G1) victory with a 126 that day.
“The first day that I sat on him, I thought, ‘Wow, what an amazing animal,’” Flightline’s exercise river Juan Leyva told Thoroughbred Daily News. “Just the way he moves is so different from other horses. And I’ve been at this for quite a while now, so I draw from experience of being on some good horses in the past. And he was just something that I had never experienced.”
Flightline became the seventh Breeders’ Cup winner for TAPIT to end his career, finishing one spot ahead of TAPIT’s new studmate OLYMPIAD Olympiad in the Breeders’ Cup Classic (G1).
Bred by Summer Wind Equine, Flightline has a three-year-old TAPIT full brother named Olivier and his multiple graded stakes winning dam returned to TAPIT last year as well.
TAPIT has seen six of his runners earn nine Eclipse Awards between them with his other winners being Essential Quality, Unique Bella, Untapable, Hansen, and Stardom Bound.