God bless the world ranking for breeding stallions..
Or maybe not. According to my calculations Vitalis is the winner of the dressage ranking while Zavall VDL would be the uncrowned king of eventing. Read the post and you'll find out why.
It’s that time of the year when the WBFSH release the world ranking for the breeding stallions. This would also be the time of the year when yours truly start grinding her teeth over the very same world ranking for breeding stallions.
This is the current world ranking for breeding stallions in eventing.
Here are the showjumpers.
Last but not least we also have the world ranking for leading sires of dressage horses.
Looks good doesn’t it? First of all I just pray to the breeding gods no breeder in their sane minds fall for this complete BS that is connected to these rankings. Second of all I seriously question why no one seem to question these rankings what so ever?
No questions asked?
I cannot be the only one realising these ranking more than anything benefit the stallions that have few really good offspring.
Or the ones with many the offspring not even having to be on the absolute top level as reaching the world ranking top 100!
At least this is how it was and have been for a long time in eventing. Which happens to be the only list I actually dig into every year.
Every year also happens to be where I pull in these lists to a simple excel sheet and recalculate the numbers.
And let me tell you this. It doesn’t really matter if one only make a simple average point per offspring or go deeper in with ones calculations.
Cause for sure the ranking spots change, and not only by little, no the normal state of things is they change a lot!
On average makes a new king
If we go back and take a look at the top ten of eventing stallions the top ten list looks like the following.
Only by making a list of the average ranking points per these stallions the list will flip over making Zavall VDL KWPN (Casall x Emilion) the number one stallion.
He is then followed by Diarado Holst. (Diamant de Semilly x Corrado 1) and Kannan KWPN (Voltaire x Nimmerdor). Kannan also happens to top the official world ranking for show jumping horses.
The full on average list will look like this:
(10) Zavall VDL
(1) Diarado
(5) Kannan
(8) Tolan R
(4) Grafenstolz
(3) Jaguar Mail
(9) Vigo d’Arsouilles
(7) Contendro 1
(6) Upsilon
(2) OBOS Quality
It paints quite the picture now doesn’t it? Zavall VDL sweeping up from below and making the number one spot.
While OBOS Quality drop from the number two spot all the way down to the bottom!
Making a ranking list based on the average ranking point by the offspring would have been almost too simple though.
Almost as simple as in just summing up all the ranking points from all the offspring [if listed with an actually pedigree in the FEI database] as is done by the WBFSH.
So as always I took it one step further. I also took into account if and how many offspring actually made it into the top 100 of the world ranking.
Which interestingly enough support the average ranking points of the amount of offspring out their in the world. Making international starts, and scoring points while doing so I might ad.
In the new list, which for me seem to be the most accurate one, Zavall VDL is the undefeated leader. Followed by Diarado and Kannan. The number following the name of the stallion is the number that came out in my calculations1.
You can see the current WFBSH ranking in between the ().
Zavall VDL (10) 9
Diarado (1) 7.1
Kannan (5) 4.5
Grafenstolz (4) 3.88
Vigo d’Arsouilles (9) 3.78
Tolan R (8) 3.68
Jaguar Mail (3) 2.4
Contendro 1 (7) 0.61
Upsilon (6) 0.4
OBOS Quality (2) 0.17
Axing the dressage ranking
I did not go into the show jumping rankings just yet. But this year of 2024 I decided to take my formula to the test and hit the dressage ranking. According to the WBFSH it should look like this.
But the dressage ranking also proves that stallions with a lot of offspring and stallions with a few good ones will benefit in the WBFSH world ranking.
From that ranking three stallions stick out more than others because of this. Listed in chronological order they are Jazz, Ampere and San Amour.
Most interesting in this trio is San Amour. I will get back to that later.
First of all let’s look at the top 10 stallions according to average rankings points side by side with the official world ranking.
Bordeaux 28 (9)
Vivaldi (10)
Quaterback (2)
Totilas (4)
Blue Hors Zack (3)
Apache (6)
Johnson TN (1)
Ampere (7)
Jazz (5)
San Amour 1 (8)
As we can see when counting the average points per offspring, both Bordeaux 28 KWPN (United x Gribaldi) and Vivaldi KWPN (Krack C x Jazz) ahead of Quaterback DSP (Quaterman x Brandenburger) climbs to the top. While Johnson TN KWPN (Jazz x Flemmingh) drops to 7th place.
But now things are about to get really interesting. When bringing offspring who made it into the world ranking top 100 one stallion won’t make it on to the list. This would be San Amour 1 Old. (Sandro Hit x Plaisir d’Amour). He goes from the number 8th spot on the WFBSH world ranking to number ten when calculating the average scores of competing offspring.
Bringing the top 100 offspring into the equation he doesn’t even make the list.
Which kind of proves the vulnerability of placing all ranking points of any known2 offspring into account when creating a world ranking for breeding stallions.
The following list have been calculated the same way as the second list of the eventing horses.
But since San Amour 1 did not make one single point on this list I brought in stallion number 11 which would be Vitalis KWPN (Vivaldi x D-Day) from the WFBSH ranking to “fill up his spot”.
The result is to say the least interesting. You can see the current WFBSH ranking in between the ().
Vitalis (11) 425
Bordeaux (9) 324
Quaterback (2) 308.76
Totilas (4) 254.24
Blue Hors Zack (3) 228.44
Vivaldi (10) 205.34
Johnson TN (1) 197.40
Apache (6) 173.82
Jazz (5) 73.22
Ampere (7) 56.65
San Amour (8) 0
So what is the point with these calculations? Well, the point is to make people open there eyes a little. There are endless stallion owners and such who goes all in on the current WBFSH ranking when marketing “their” stallions.
But truth of the matter is the ranking is indeed benefitting both stallions with a lot of competing offspring as well as the ones with a few top ones making ranking points. It also benefits the stallions whose offspring indeed have their pedigrees listed in the database of the international equestrian federation that is the FEI.
My own personal findings have showed over and over again one find more pedigrees searching through HorseTelex and or Hippomundo. My preference being HorseTelex which has been around the longest.
If one like to make a good decision in what and why to breed one needs to be a bit more informed than that.
The Hoofbeat Chronicles is a personal blog. The views and ideas of this blog are personal and belongs to the author. Which mean they or may not line up with your own personal views and ideas.
I am not giving out my way of counting. Even though I always try to be correct and precise I also won’t take any responsibility for the human factor listing the numbers. ↩
The WBFSH world ranking is based on competitions results from a database where still a lot of horses are in fact missing their pedigree. ↩