NEWS from South Africa that Duke Of Marmalade (Danehill) has been retired from stud duties at the age of 17 is disappointing, especially for the team at Drakenstein Stud where he has been since he left Coolmore after completing his fifth season there in 2013.

The fact that his fee dropped from €40,000 to €12,500 in Ireland would indicate why he left for sunnier climes. He also shuttled to Australia.

However, no sooner had he left Ireland than the Group 1 winners appeared. In 2015 Simple Verse won the St Leger and the Qipco British Champions Fillies and Mares Stakes, Star Of Seville captured the Prix de Diane-French Oaks and Nutan landed the Deutsches (German) Derby. In the following two years Sound Of Freedom added the Premio Lydia Tesio to the list of Group 1 wins, while Big Orange won the Ascot Gold Cup in 2017. In South Africa he has sired two Group 1 winners and eight other group or listed winners.

Growing influence

Duke Of Marmalade has also started to emerge as a potentially significant broodmare sire, which would be no surprise given that so many of his daughters did well as racemares.

So far he is the damsire of Group 2 Park Hill Stakes winner Free Wind (Galileo), Group 2 Italian Derby winner Keep On Fly (Rip Van Winkle), Group 3 winner and this year’s Group 1 Irish Derby runner-up Lone Eagle (Galileo), Group 3 winners Lady Wannabe (Camelot) and Antonia De Vega (Lope De Vega), stakes winners Chilean (Iffraaj) and Moll (Camelot), and the 2021 Grade 1 Belmont Oaks third Higher Truth (Galileo).

Following his retirement on veterinary grounds, his owners messaged that the stallion “will live out his days at Drakenstein Stud and watch from his paddock his ever growing influence as a broodmare sire around the world.”

Bred by Southern Bloodstock and trained by Aidan O’Brien, Duke Of Marmalade won just a single race in his first two seasons, a juvenile maiden at the Curragh over seven furlongs, but he did run second in both the Group 1 St James’s Palace Stakes, to stable companion Excellent Art, and the Irish Champion Stakes to another stable companion, Dylan Thomas, at three.

Iron Duke

Johnny Murtagh was in the saddle for Duke Of Marmalade’s four-year-old season, and this yielded five Group 1 races in succession. He won the Prix Ganay as a prelude to defeating Finsceal Beo in the Tattersalls Gold Cup. He was a scintillating winner by four lengths of the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot, stepped up to a mile and a half to win the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, and then earned the title of ‘Iron Duke’ when he beat the Derby winner New Approach and others to win the 10-furlong International Stakes.

Duke Of Marmalade is one of two Group 1 winning sons of the group-placed Love Me True (Kingmambo). The other is Ruler Of The World (Galileo), and he too is a Group 1 sire. They are among eight winners for their dam and that list also includes the Group 2 Adelaide Cup winner Annus Mirabilis (Montjeu), and the Group 1 Irish Derby third Giovanni Canaletto (Galileo).