Racing, Kontiki and the Davenport Hadbans

Last week I was talking with a Syrian friend from Aleppo over the phone. Conversations always start with updates on the security situation there, and end with what they were supposed to start with — horse talk. I was telling him about the recent concerted preservation effort that is underway in the USA, to conserve what remained of the Davenport Arabians of the Hadban Enzahi strain, which goes back to the desert mare *Hadba of the Northern Shammar Bedouins, imported to the USA by Homer Davenport in 1906.

I was telling him how much I was struck by the racy, elongated, body structure of these Davenport Hadbans — see Anita Enander’s photo of the heavily linebred Hadban RL Boomerette  as one example. He laughed, and told me how a now deceased horse merchant had told him that, in the past, the particular branch of the Hadban Enzahi strain from the Northern Shammar (which *Hadba belongs to) were very prized as racehorses across the Middle East, despite their small size. He told me the story of one of these Hadban stallions, who raced and won at the Beirut racetracks, was so successful there that he was sent to the Iraq racetracks, where he also won, and from there to racetracks in India, where he won so many races that a statue of his likeness was erected there.

I promised myself to check for an Arabian horse statue at one of the racetracks in India at some point, but in the meantime, as I was looking at the pedigrees of US Arabian horses of racing lines, it downed on me that the founder of the top US racing lines of Arabians horses, the legendary racehorse Kontiki (Camelot x Almiki by Abu Farwa) (“Kontiki The Great”, winner of 8 races out of 9, including the 1971 National Championship, photo below), was ….. a Hadban Enzahi tracing to Davenport’s *Hadba.

According to this link, “Kontiki was such an exceptional racehorse that he was honored by the Thoroughbred Jockey Club as the 59th entry in the prestigious list of “100 All Time Greatest Racehorse of the World-Regardless of Breed”” along with Man O-War, Native Dancer, Kelso, Secretariat and John Henry. He was also named U.S. National Champion Racehorse and a member of the Arabian Horse Trust Hall of Fame.”

I thought to myself, that if I owned one of these Davenport Hadban colts, (a) I would feel lucky; (b) I would put it on the race track in a minute, and if I were one of those racehorses breeders, I would (a) brand my horses as “from the same female line as Kontiki”, and (b) I would go straight back to the source of the greatness, and try to find other Kontikis within the Davenport Hadban tail female, instead of linbreeding to Kontiki himself again and again.. then again, it wouldn’t be the first nor the last time that the greatest of horse lines end up in the wrong hands, and become so overlooked and under-appreciated that they are literally thrown away to the dogs..

 

15 Replies to “Racing, Kontiki and the Davenport Hadbans”

  1. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a person or a group of people would do what you have described above? These horses (the Davenport Hadban group) are so nice and they have not been given the respect and accord that they truly deserve!

  2. Great story about the Hadba’s Edouard. Contiki also benefits from 5 lines to Hamrah, several to Wadduda and of course Antez is in there, the horse who ran a very fast mile and then sired some winners in Poland when exported there before comming back to the US. Thinking of Antez I am reminded of the 2007 AK convention fantasia and the handsome chestnut stallion Personic LF, a very Antez look-alike who had been briefly trained for racing and showed great form in the horse presentation in Paso Robles.
    Another performance element in Kontiki’s pedigree is the repeated crosses to Astraled, via his son Rustem with multiple crosses to his daughters, plus a line to Astraled’s son Gulastra, a key element in many endurance winners. Add to that there is one line to Nasr who for a while held the record for one mile in Egypt.
    Kontiki is also double Alla Amarward, perhaps one of the more influential Al Khamsa part-Davenport stallions in American breeding.
    The Davenport foundation mare in Kontiki’s tail female line is Saaida (Gommusa x Hadba) is pictured in the old AHC stud book in both the 1918 and 1927 volumes. She has good legs and great depth of heart as can also be seen on a lot of these old Hadbans.

  3. So the theory is that horses sharing a distant tail-female ancestor will also share racing ability? This sounds like the Bruce Lowe Figure System applied to Arabians.

  4. At least in the Middle East, and until the relatively recent advent of sire-centered Thoroughbred-style racing practices in the Gulf, race horse breeders believed (and continue to believe) that the racing potential of a line originates in the tail female, and is enhanced (or reduced) by the addition of good (or bad) stallions in the middle of the pedigree down to the sire.

    Race horse breeders have classified female lines according to their racing potential.. and in years of observation of race horse winners at the Beirut racetrack I found that the classification does hold water.

    For instance, in a given race, a horse from the Shaykhan (Layya’s) strain, or the K. Dunaysan (Lebnaniah’s paternal grandsire’s strain), or the Hadban al-Fawairah strain (Lebnaniah’s sire’s strain) would always be favored to win over horses from strains recognized as less “racy”, everything else held equal. of course many other factors come into play as well.

    The branch of the Kuhaylan Dajani strain to which El Nasser belongs to has been throwing one race winner after the other for sixty years now.. etc. etc.

    But what’s the Bruce Lowe Figure System?

  5. There’s an article about it here:

    http://www.thoroughbredreview.com/BruceLowe.htm

    In brief, during the 1800s, Bruce Lowe analyzed the General Stud Book and determined that every modern English Thoroughbred traced to one of 43 taproot mares in Volume I of the GSB. Subsequently, other researchers argued that some of Bruce Lowe’s separate families actually traced to the same taproot, and of course modern mtDNA analysis has further rewritten the story, so the system was flawed from the outset.

    But back to Bruce Lowe. Once he identified his 43 root mares, he counted how many wins members of each mare family had in the Epsom Derby, Epsom Oaks, and St. Leger Stakes. The family with the most wins became Family 1, and the family with the fewest winners became Family 43.

    The article linked above comments:

    “Perhaps the only documented case of statistically analyzing the validity of Lowe’s system came in the late 1930’s when Phil Bull, a professional handicapper and founder of Timeform, compiled the pedigrees of what he believed to be the worst horses running in England at the time. With a sample size of 430 (possibly a passive aggressive jab at Lowe and Allison), Bull itemized them as a function of their Lowe family number and found similar dynamics to what Figure System proponents claimed to exist in the upper echelons of the population. That is to say, the largest contributors to this sad group of individuals were families one and two. Conversely, there was but one member of this sample that originated from Family 43.”

  6. Here are the last ten winners of the Kentucky Derby with the family numbers given in the pedigreequery.com Thoroughbred Database:

    Smarty Jones, family no. 1
    Super Saver, family no. 1
    Animal Kingdom, family no. 1

    Giacomo, family no. 2

    Big Brown, family no. 5

    Funny Cide, family no. 6

    Barbaro, family no. 16

    Street Sense, family no. 22

    Mine That Bird, family no 23
    I’ll Have Another, family no. 23

    1. That’s interesting. A somewhat similar informal classification developed in Lebanon, for Lebanese and Syrian race horse lines, along three categories. Category one was composed of those lines, whose representatives were expected to win 10 races or more, everything else held equal, and were priced accordingly. In this category, there were: 1) the Kuhaylan al-Kharas marbat of Akkar in Northern Lebanon; 2) the Kuhaylan al-Nawwaq marbat of Dabbah Agha al-Dandashi of Tall Kalakh; 3) the Ma’naqi Sbayli marbat of Malek and Sulayman al-Ali of Akkar (the strain of Karawan sire of *Bint Rajwa); the Saqlawi Jadran Ibn Zubayni marbat of Nayif Agha al-Dandashi of Tall Kalakh (the strain of the sire of *Muha, daughter of *Noura), etc.

  7. Regarding the importance of the tail-female connection, Secretariat’s daughters also have/had a higher percentage of successful progeny–far more than Secretariat himself. So I don’t find it surprising at all that Kon Tiki’s female descendants have had such an impact.

  8. Edouard
    Do you recall my bay Kontiki stallion you saw at the 2009 Al Khamsa/CMK symposium in Oregon? On your above mentioned queries to breeding the females aspects of Kontiki’s pedigree, I have a colt from breeding TIKIS BAY DUST to MISSTHUNDERSTRUCK. MISSTHUNDERSTRUCK is an Ibn Kontiki daughter out of a WAIKIKI daughter, therefore triple ALMIKI, KONTIKIs dam. Not exactly breeding tail *HADBA, but concentrated.

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