Mary Slack, the daughter of Mauritzfontein founders Harry and Bridget Oppenheimer, spoke sadly of the loss having just won the Gr 1 Betting World Cape Flying Championship on Saturday with her Mike de Kock-trained filly Alboran Sea.
Fort Wood will be best remembered as the sire of the great De Kock-trained Triple Crown and J&B Met hero Horse Chestnut, who is widely regarded as the best racehorse to have ever set foot on South African soil.
Fort Wood (Supplied)
Horse Chestnut was one of Fort Wood’s amazing first crop that contained two other Gr 1 winners, Fort Defiance and the filly Dog Wood.
Horse Chestnut was one of three Horses Of The Year that Fort Wood produced. The other two were the Geoff Woodruff-trained Celtic Grove and the great Dean Kannemeyer-trained Dynasty, who is regarded by many to have put up the best ever performance in the country’s premier race, the Vodacom Durban July, winning from draw 20 despite running wide and fighting for his head throughout.
Dynasty is currently leading the National Sires log and Horse Chestnut has been doing well since being brought back from the USA and is in 21st place. Other Fort Wood stallions standing at stud are Whitechapel and Elusive Fort.
Fort Wood has always produced fantastic daughters and is currently leading the national broodmare sires log.
He gained a reputation as a breeder of stout horses, but this might be due to the renowned strength and courage of his progeny, as he has imparted plenty of speed too. In all he produced over 75 individual stakes winners, including 15 Gr 1 winners.
He also became known as a notable sire of sand performers. Two of his sons, Hilti and Iron Curtain, won the country’s richest sand race, the Gr 2 Emerald Cup, and another of his sons, Pylon, achieved the highest ever sand merit rating accorded in South Africa.
Fort Wood was bred in the purple being by one of history’s greatest stakes producing stallions, Sadler’s Wells, and being out of the eight-time winning Pretense mare Fall Aspen, who produced eight Group winners in Europe and America.
His promising career on the track in France, where he was trained by the legendary Andre Fabre and owned by Sheikh Mohammed, was curtailed by a fractured sesamoid as a late three-year-old by which stage he had won three out of six starts, including a courageous Gr 1 victory over ten furlongs and a Gr 2 win over eleven furlongs.
Accolades for the amazing 24-year-old bay have poured in since the news broke on Saturday.
