KILLARNEY this week saw Say Goodbye make an impressive chase debut in a race won last year by Gin On Lime, a subsequent Grade 3 winner. The Donie Sheahan Memorial Irish EBF Mares Beginners Chase could be the starting point for a good career over the larger obstacles for this year’s winner, a six-year-old daughter of Getaway (Monsun).

Getting blacktype winning daughters comes readily to Getaway, and eight of his 17 winners of listed or graded National Hunt races to date are fillies or mares. Could Say Goodbye level that score for the girls? A winner over hurdles when Sneezy Foster held the licence at Cullentra, Say Goodbye was runner-up to Party Central in the Grade B Paddy Mullins Mares Hurdle at the Dublin Racing Festival.

When breeder William Mangan from Conna, Co Cork sold Say Goodbye as a foal for a most disappointing €1,800 to Pat Kinsella, her half-sister For Sinead (Presenting) had been placed over hurdles, and her half-brother Kildisart (Dubai Destination) had placed in a point-to-point. Anyone buying the filly was betting on a lot to happen, and happen it surely did.

Reoffered as a three-year-old at the Derby Sale, where she sold for €125,000 to Mags O’Toole, Say Goodbye’s half-brother Kildisart had won the Grade 3 Betway Chase at Aintree, For Sinead won over hurdles, but her four-year-old own-brother, The Big Breakaway (Getaway), won a point-to-point on his debut and had sold for a record €360,000. He has since gone on to be Grade 1 placed a few times, and hopefully Joe Tizzard will get the big race win with him that he promises to deliver.

Improving

In any case, Say Goodbye has great racing and breeding potential, and the rest of the pedigree is improving too.

Back in November 2016 her dam Princess Mairead, a daughter of Blueprint (Generous), had run three times without troubling the judge over hurdles, and you had to go back to the third dam to find a blacktype winner. In the intervening years the pedigree has turned itself inside out.

Princess Mairead’s half-sister, the unraced Peggy Cullen (Presenting), is the dam of Rathvinden (Heron Island), a cheap €1,700 foal who became a €100,000 Derby Sale graduate and has won more than £300,000 in a career spanning nine victories.

Though he was placed at Grade 1 level over hurdles, Rathvindon’s forte has been chasing and his three Grade 3 successes in Ireland are eclipsed by his victory in the Grade 2 National Hunt Chase at the Cheltenham Festival. A Grade 1 runner-up over the larger obstacles, Rathvinden was a gallant third behind Tiger Roll and Magic Of Light in the Aintree Grand National.

Scared

Princess Mairead and Peggy Cullen are two of nine foals out of Maries Gale (Strong Gale). She was a bumper and hurdle winner, and while eight of those nine offspring raced, not one of them won a race of any kind. Such a record might have scared people away from breeding with her daughters, but now two of them have produced graded chase winners.

Maries Gale was one of four winners from Smithstown Lady (Tarqogan) who raced in France and was placed. Another of that winning quartet was Maries Gale’s full-sister Windswept Lady (Strong Gale), and that mare’s Grade 3 winning daughter Aura About You (Supreme Leader) is the dam of the ill-fated Grade 1 Golden Cygnet Novice Hurdle scorer Latest Exhibition (Oscar).

While distantly related to The Big Breakaway, another wing of this female line has in the last decade given us runners such as Grade 2 Cleeve Hurdle winner Knockara Beau (Leading Counsel), Grade 2 hurdle winners On The Blind Side (Stowaway) and Some Article (Definite Article), and Grade 3 winner Well Set Up (Gold Well).