Making the Grade: Danzing Candy

Danzing Candy after punching his ticket to the Kentucky Derby in the San Felipe Stakes. (Photos by Eclipse Sportswire)
Making the Grade, which will run through the 2016 Belmont Stakes, focuses on the winners of the big races, usually from the previous weekend, who could impact the next Triple Crown. We’ll be taking a close look at impressive winners and evaluating their chances to win classic races based upon ability, running style, connections (owner, trainer, jockey) and pedigree.
This week we take a closer look at Danzing Candy, winner of the $400,000 San Felipe Stakes on March 12 at Santa Anita Park.

Danzing Candy

Dark Bay or Brown Colt
Sire (Father): Twirling Candy
Dam (Mother): Talkin and Singing, by Songandaprayer
Owner: Halo Farms, Jim Bashor and Diane Bashor
Breeder: Halo Farms (Ky.)
Trainer: Clifford W. Sise Jr.

A three-race winning streak capped by a visually impressive victory in the Grade 2 San Felipe Stakes catapulted Danzing Candy onto the path to the Kentucky Derby as a serious player. Talented but lightly raced, Danzing Candy presents a challenge for racing fans and handicappers with plenty of promise but a limited foundation and an incomplete résumé. Let’s try to assess how he stacks up on the Road to the Kentucky Derby.
Ability: Danzing Candy debuted in November at Del Mar in a sprint race and his inexperience showed. He broke about a step and a half slowly from the inside post and ducked in before pulling his rider right up on the heels of a pack of three horses stalking the pace. Danzing Candy tried to launch a sweeping bid on the turn and briefly looked like a contender, but he ran out of gas in the stretch after basically sprinting along the backstretch just to catch back up to the field. Since his debut, Danzing Candy has three wins by a combined margin of 11 lengths.
Danzing Candy earned a 102 Equibase Speed Figure for his first career win in a seven-eighths of a mile maiden special weight race in December at Santa Anita then won by 5 ¾ lengths when stretching out to a mile for a Feb. 4 allowance race, also at Santa Anita, for which he earned a 106 speed figure.
Trainer Cliff Sise Jr. then tested Danzing Candy in the Grade 2 San Felipe and he showed his class. Danzing Candy led from start to finish as the 5.50-to-1 fourth betting choice under Mike Smith, leading through an opening quarter-mile in :22.96 and a half-mile in :46.11 and then having enough stamina in reserve to hold off highly regarded Mor Spirit and Exaggerator. The 110 Equibase Speed Figure for his two-length San Felipe win was another new career best and made it four races in a row in which he has improved. The four-point jumps in his most recent two victories also shouldn’t be too taxing. He’s 3-for-3 at Santa Anita Park and figures to be formidable in the Grade 1 Santa Anita Derby on April 9.
“He’s a big horse. He’s still carrying a lot of flesh on him,” jockey Mike Smith said of Danzing Candy after the San Felipe. “There’s room to trim him down as we get closer to the Derby and we’re doing it little by little. He’s handling everything. He’s a big, beautiful horse and he’ll start tucking up as we get closer.”
Running style: Since dropping back to last after a terrible start in his debut, Danzing Candy has won three straight as a front-runner, leading at every point of call in his three subsequent races. Trainer Cliff Sise Jr. said the plan was to go right to the front in the San Felipe, but he thinks Danzing Candy is capable of rating just off the pace if necessary.
“I expected him to be on the lead [in the San Felipe]. We didn’t want to experiment,” Sise said. “Mike [Smith] just said, ‘I’ll let him come out the first few jumps and if he’s there, he’s there. If somebody sends, he’ll sit second.”
The Road to the Kentucky Derby Leaderboard has made it less likely that pure speed horses, who under the previous Derby qualifying system could bank graded stakes earnings in sprints, reach the first jewel of the Triple Crown. Not needing to account for sprinters makes it a bit easier on horses who prefer to be on or near the lead in longer races.
DANZING CANDY WINNING THE SAN FELIPE

Connections: Trainer Cliff Sise Jr. finished second in the 2015 San Felipe and fourth in the Santa Anita Derby with Prospect Park, but that horse missed the Kentucky Derby last year because of an elevated white blood cell count and a fever. Prospect Park would have been Sise’s first Kentucky Derby starter, but now it looks like Danzing Candy could have that honor.
Sise started out as a jockey in the late 1960s and before moving on to training and serving as an assistant for Lou Glauburg and Noble Threewitt. He earned his first graded stakes victory with Paying Dues in the Grade 3 Los Angeles Handicap in 1996. Paying Dues finished second later that year in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint. Idiot Proof gave Sise his first Grade 1 win in the 2007 Ancient Title Stakes and also finished second in that year’s Breeders’ Cup Sprint.
Sise took a break from training from 2011 to 2013 to serve as manager of Rancho Paseana, a facility near Del Mar that raised young horses, offered layups and boarded broodmares. Sise helped turn Rancho Paseana into an official training center before it was sold by owner Jenny Craig. It was at Rancho Paseana that Sise was responsible for the early training of eventual champion Shared Belief for his breeders Marty and Pam Wygod.
Hall of Fame rider Mike Smith has 5,320 victories through March 28 and his mounts have earned more than $274-million in his career.
Best known as the regular rider of 2010 Horse of the Year Zenyatta and 1994 Horse of the Year Holy Bull, Smith also is the all-time leading rider by Breeders’ Cup wins with 22.  In the Triple Crown, Smith guided Giacomo to victory in the 2005 Kentucky Derby, Prairie Bayou to a win in the 1993 Preakness Stakes and won the Belmont Stakes with Drosselmeyer in 2010 and Palace Malice in 2013.
Danzing Candy is owned by Ted Aroney’s Halo Farms along with and Jim and Diane Bashor. Aroney and the Bashors have raced horses in partnership since 2012, but Danzing Candy is their first graded stakes winner as a partnership.
Halo Farms raced Grade 1 winner Evita Argentina in partnership with Three Sisters Thoroughbred and won the 2010 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile with Dakota Phone, who was owned by the partnership of John Carver, George Todaro, Jerry Hollendorfer and Halo Farms. Halo and Hollendorfer also teamed to win the 2013 San Felipe with Hear the Ghost. Danzing Candy would be the first Kentucky Derby starter for Aroney as well as the Bashors.

Previous Making the Grades
Nyquist
Exaggerator
Airoforce
Flexibility
Collected
Mo Tom
Discreetness
Sunny Ridge
Mohaymen
Mor Spirit
Gun Runner
Zulu
Destin
Cupid

Pedigree: Danzing Candy is from the first crop of Grade 1 winner Twirling Candy, a homebred of Sid and Jenny Craig who won seven of 11 lifetime races and earned $944,900.  Twirling Candy was fast enough to set a new track record for seven-eighths of a mile in the 2010 Malibu Stakes and boasted the stamina to win the Grade 2, 1 1/8-mile Californian Stakes and to finish second by a head in the 1 ¼-mile TVG Pacific Classic Stakes.
Twirling Candy’s first crop of runners also includes stakes winners Iron Rob and Twirling Cinnamon and Grade 2-placed winners Gift Box and Annie’s Candy.
Talkin and Singing, by Songandaprayer, is the dam of Danzing Candy. Winless in nine races, Talkin and Singing finished second twice at 1 1/16 miles and third twice at one mile. Talkin and Singing is a half-sister (same dam [mother], different sire [father]) to 2004 John Deere Breeders’ Cup Turf winner Better Talk Now, a multiple Grade 1 winner at 1 3/8 miles and 1 ½ miles.
Digging deeper into the pedigree reveals a few other classy runners in the first four generations, but many of those go more than 50 years back.
There is enough to like in Danzing Candy’s pedigree to remain on the bandwagon if you are a fan. At this point, it looks like his biggest hurdle will be cramming the foundation and maturation necessary to win the Kentucky Derby into just five races before the main event. That feels like a lot to ask even though we are seeing so many lightly raced Derby hopefuls every year that it feels like the norm rather than the exception.